A good pair of winding lath or winding sticks is sometimes hard to find — I suspect not many survived the burn pile. The good news is that a new set is easily made in an few minutes at the bench.

Why would I want a pair of ‘Winding Sticks’? What do they do?

• This pair of matching straight-edges are a fast and invaluable tool that allows you to quickly see if a board is flat.
• By placing them at each end of a board, sighting down across the near stick and looking at the far one, you can more easily see any twisting or warping in the board. The sticks help accentuate any non-planer surfaces.
• By moving one stick and sighting the board at a few locations along its length, you will quickly see how the board flows.
• Using a single stick you can also check for any cupping or warping as you would with any other straightedge.
• Once you identify parts of the board that need to be addressed, you can quickly plane them and re-evaluate the board using these sticks. (After a bit of practice, process goes quite fast)

From Otto Salomon’s ‘Teacher’s Handbook of Sloyd’ above you can read a nice description for how to use winding laths efficiently. The pair of wooden Sloyd winding laths shown above nest with each other via a set of fitted wooden pins and have a nice relief one the edge of the short sides so you can easily get a finger hold in there and separate the sticks when you want to use them. Otto also calls out an interesting alternative you can use in a pinch — by turning two try-planes on their side you can use them as an impromptu set of winding sticks and sight across them.

Tips on making your own winding sticks:

• Use quarter-sawn hardwood like hard maple or beech
• Consider adding a contrasting inlay or strip to make it easier to sight across the sticks
• I like to use sticks that are 1/2″ thick, about 2″ wide and about 18-24″ long
• Sticks that can nest with each other or otherwise stay together are more likely to survive
• Taper each stick  on one side so that it’s clear what edge is the top (it will not stand on its own on the edge you plane down to 1/8″)
• If your sticks ever get out of true they are easily squared up again with a plane

The next time you are out in the shop, make a quick set of winding sticks and see how much it can improve your board flattening efficiency.

-Bill

P.S. If you don’t have the the time or scrap to make your own set from wood, and don’t have 2 jack or try planes handy, you need to have a stern talking to, but there are commercially available winding sticks available from Lee Valley and others. I admit that I do have a pair of the Lee Valley aluminum winding sticks which I bought when I first got started in hand tool woodworking. They are well machined and the design hits all the major tips called out above — with the exception of being made of wood of course.

Much like the shop made winding sticks, these aluminum sticks work well and need virtually no maintenance.

P.P.S — This is an extended version of a post I put together for my friends at Popular Woodworking on the contributor’s blog which can be found here.