shoot

To shoot is to plane the edge or face of a board until it is perfectly straight and flat, free from wind, twist, or hollow. This is foundational work in carpentry: you cannot join boards accurately, set them flush, or assemble frames square unless the mating surfaces are shot first. The term survives from the era when a carpenter would push a plane along the length of timber, working the sole flat against the grain to avoid tearout.

A shooting board is the jig used for the work. For edges, the board is laid on its side in the board, and a plane (historically a jointer or jack plane, now often a low-angle block plane) is worked lengthwise along it, held on rails that guide the sole perpendicular to the work surface. For faces, the board may be placed flat and planed, though a truly flat reference surface is hard to achieve without machinery. Many shooters clamp the workpiece flat and run a hand plane diagonally across the grain to avoid lifting fibers at the edge.

Why and when shooting matters

Shooting an edge straight is essential before edge-gluing boards into panels, dovetailing, or mortise-and-tenon work. A board that looks straight to the eye may have a convex or concave edge invisible until you try to fit a joint. Even a few thousandths of an inch of hollow or crown in a long board will prevent shoulders from seating and joints from closing fully. Frame-and-panel doors, window frames, and cabinet sides all demand true edges. A board shot to the jointer at the mill is flattened lengthwise but not necessarily straight on all four sides; the carpenter must verify and correct before assembly.

The work is slow by hand and demands skill. Tearout is common in difficult grain; planing against the grain, or in grain that reverses, will lift fibers and ruin the surface. Fine tuning the plane iron, taking thin shavings, and working deliberately from one end toward the other helps but does not guarantee success on wild wood. Many carpenters now use a jointer or planer for the bulk of the work and reserve hand shooting for final fitting of critical joints or for timber that machines struggle with.

The name derives from the sound and motion: a plane pushed swiftly along the edge sounds like a rifle shot, and in old texts the verb is sometimes spelled as "shute." In modern machine shops, "shoot" can mean to surface-grind a flat precisely, but in carpentry the term applies only to hand or power planing work, never to sanding or grinding.