I didn't get to spend a lot of time in the shop today, but I did get a couple of hours. The humidity in the shop is down to 47% now so I feel safe working on the OOO again. I decided since my LMI order hasn't arrived yet, I would go ahead and start with the neck. First up is to make sure that that I have at least one straight edge to work with. Well, the blank was fairly rough and no side was straight so I needed to clean an edge up. Problem is, I don't have a jointer. I have used my table saw in the past to straighten up an edge and it works fairly well, but this time I decided to try using my router table to do the job. I have never done this before but it really is a pretty straight forward procedure and works well with smaller boards like the neck blank. I set the fence a distance 1/16" closer to the bit than the width of the board. Then I ran it though. This shaves off the "high" spots on a curved board but will not cut the "low" spots. Once I did that, I re-set the fence to the depth of the shallow section and ran it again. This gets it pretty close, but still not perfect. It needed a third pass about 1/16" closer so it cuts the entire length. This gets one side straight. Once that is done, I flipped the board and did the other side, but this time it only took one pass since I had a straight edge on the fence.
Next up, cutting a scarf cut for the peghead blank. I thought this would be pretty easy until I actually tried to do it. I originally thought "no problem, I'll use my chop saw". Buzzzzz. Wrong answer. Thanks for playing, we have a nice parting gift for you. You see, the cut needs to be 15 degrees, and the chop saw doesn't cut that sharp of an angle unless the board is held straight out parallel with the blade. Of course that won't work, and it would only get a cut at the end of the board anyways and mine needed to be a few inches from the end. It was at this time that my foggy little mind remembered a jig I saw on Kathy Matsushita's website for a scarf cutting jig. I dashed inside to my computer, looked it up, and printed up the plan. After about an hour of cutting, nailing, and gluing I had a jig for cutting this. I got it all clamped up, and cut without any problems. That jig may seem like a waste of time for such a simple cut, but it really works well and I am sure I will get a lot of use out of it. By this time I had other things I needed to get done so I closed up the shop until tomorrow. I did get my LMI order before I left so I took 4 pieces of bloodwood binding wood and sprayed it down with Super Soft 2 and the plan is to try and bend these tomorrow.
This is my router as a jointer setup. Pretty straight forward.
You can see that the first side wasn't quite perfect but very close.
This is what it looked like after the first pass. You can see it cleaned the high spots but didn't touch the low spot in the center. After a couple of passes I got it very close to perfect as shown in the picture above. I used that side as a guide to get a perfect edge on the opposite side. (Sorry, I got the pictures in the wrong order here)
Here is my scarf cutting jig. It sure was a close call with the clamps not hitting the saw blade. It missed the blade by less than 1/4". That is why I chose plastic spring clamps for the job. If I was off in my measuring, at least I wouldn't destroy my saw blade! Thanks Kathy for the plan on your site!
The cut straight from the saw. Almost perfect. I need to do a little touchup sanding but it is pretty much ready for glue and clamps.
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