Ripping the strips

Whoever said that ripping and milling the strips would take an afternoon is the same guy when asked if the water is cold, says " the waters beautiful!"

Dork.

If you start your afternoon at around seven AM and end when you're done the next day, maybe. These folks must love to lie. It's just around the corner, you'll see. You can't miss it. It must be a seriously twisted puppy to want to lead some poor, unsuspecting moron into the depths of strip ripping hell. As an experienced carp, even I knew glue vapors permeated this ridiculous assumption. At $3.95 a linear foot for 1 by 6 cedar, you don't want get it wrong or rush through it.

Heres a couple of tips that I didn't find on line, but relate to table saw use. You can use a standard ripping blade, but it will have an eight inch kerf. You can use a thin kerf ripping blade at 3/32. The thinnest saw blade you can find is a 7 and a quarter thin carbide tipped thing for about 15 bucks. 24 teeth should do it. All blades will run truer if you try to find oversized blade stiffeners. I use a device called a blade truing disc that is no longer available from Lee Valley. Too bad, 'cause it works like charm. It is a disc with about 8 pug screws it that push on the body of the blade and bring it back into true. You need a dial gauge micrometer and about 45 minutes to set it up correctly, but it's worth the effort. Seeing as it is now currently made of unobtainium, I'm really just gloating, because, like, I got one and you don't. In truth, the super thin kerf blade didn't do so well. I liked the idea of loosing less wood because of the tiny kerf, and I also had been advised that this would work well from a trusted if somewhat misguided associate carpenter. I will use my brand new Freud thin kerf ripping blade with the 3/32 tooth width on the next sawdust making session. That will be thin enough. The thinner 7 and 1/4 inch blade had the tendency to follow the grain when things got twisted or the grain got weird and I think it may have heated up as I got near the end of twenty foot rip. I ended up with the odd thin board and this is a nightmare come fairing time. Consistent strip thickness is imperative. This is now some thing I know from experience, I'm afraid to say.

Another good idea is to build a feather board with about 5 - 1 inch rare earth magnets. It sticks like bugger and can re adjusted with the tap of a mallet, even when the saw is running. ( blade guard removed for clarity ) Feather boards or some kind of hold down is good on the fence, too. I built a birch plywood extension cap for my fence, and screwed strips to it to pin down the boards. A thin splitter mounted into a purpose built zero clearance insert into the table is a great idea, too. I used maple for the splitter and MDF for the insert. Try to cut from one side of the board to the other in order. Number each piece so you can sequence the boards if desired. Trust me on this one. If you have to flip a board over, make sure your marking system reflects this. Each board gets a letter. Each strip gets a number. If you flip the board, add a letter 'R' indicate cutting from the other side. If you have warped boards, which strangely enough can happen, I recommend a dry run to see if you can force the boards flat. If not choose from the following ideas. You can face the board cup down and start ripping while applying pressure. You will probably end up with some pieces that are less than perfect over their length, but with useable bits. You can face the cup up and try to force it flat while trying to keep the edge square to edge of the fence. This will not be successful and wasted material will ensue. Because warped means twisted, twisted is usually cupped. I always find that cup down is better. If both of these axis' are seriously wonky, try ripping that baby right up the middle making it easier to muscle flat, or try cutting out the twist if possible. The twist is sometimes just at one end. If you're lucky. If it's summer and hot and sunny, soak the board down, put it out in the sun and weight it down flat. Rinse, repeat. Presto. Straight board. It was february in Winnipeg when I ripped the boards. No straight boards for me.

It really helps to have at least one smooth face to start with. In the ripping process, this isn't crucial, but in the routing stage, it is. A small surface planer can make all the bad dreams go away. If the surface of the board is rough, it will not mill true. The thin strips are harder to control and you don't want the router to take off too much wood, so you will have to set the bit to take the shallowest bite. This is where the rough surface can mess you up. You don't want to make more than one pass over the bit per strip. A rough surface on the board becomes the edge on the strip, and even a little bounce will reflect in the milling. Hold downs and featherboards are a must in this operation, and another good idea is to under cut a featherboard by 1/4 inch and place it immediately behind the router bit.The undercutting will pin the strip to the table and to the fence simultaneously. Route the bead first in all your strips. If you have a few lengths of scrap maple, cut some hardwood strips, too. When you are ready to mill the coves, do a strip of maple first. I use the cove in the maple strip as a guide for the cedar along the router fence. This is where you can set the fence to allow the cove cutter to size each following strip to a consistent width. This is very important for symmetry, grasshopper. And it almost works, too!