Although it takes considerably more sweat to mill your lumber using traditional handplanes, if you do it by hand, you’ll never be limited by the size of your milling machinery. Furniture-maker Andrew Hunter uses Japanese planes to mill lumber,  but the methodology is the same–be it Western or Japanese tools. The only difference is in the stroke. Japanese handplanes cut with a pull stroke, while Western tools cut with a push stroke.

Hunter uses a rough plane, a jointer plane, and a smoothing plane to mill his lumber in two passes: a rough pass and a final smoothing pass. In this short video, he demonstrates his entire technique from start to finish.