Working with plywood

Trimming edging materials

To trim iron-on edge banding, I use a regular angle block plane. A chisel will work too, but can do a lot of damage if you aren’t careful. Remember that a hand plane is nothing but a chisel holder that regulates depth of cut. One wrong move with a chisel and you’re cutting deep into the plywood’s face veneers.

For solid-wood edging, you’ll be tempted to use a router with a flush-trim bit. Your router has to run on the edge, though, so you’ll have to rig up some sort of wider support board next to the plywood in your vise to steady the router. Or you could try placing the edge down on a router table, using a fence to steady the panel vertically.

It never fails, though: a huge chunk of tearout happens at the least convenient moment, perhaps damaging the face veneers at the same time. I prefer to flush off solid-wood edging with hand planes. It may sound crazy, but once you learn to use a hand plane well, it can do a remarkable job at this task. I start with my #4 smoothing plane to get the bulk of the edging close to the face veneers. Then I switch to my regular angle block plane for more control to remove the final .002″ to .003″ or so. A cambered blade easily keeps the cutting edge off the face veneers, and a 50º effective cutting angle prevents tearout even better than my #4. I achieve this set-up by grinding a 30º bevel angle on the blade, which sits in the plane body at a 20º bedding angle. Keep it sharp and don’t forget to go with the grain. Grain reversals will require you to plane in both directions for different parts of the edging-something a router cannot do.