pile of strips

Many hours on the table saw and several garbage cans full of sawdust later, all the boards are now strips. This was a pretty tedious part of the process and I imagine that doing the edge profiling is going to be similar.

The good thing is that I have more than enough strips. Without knowing how much would be lost to waste and blade kerf I was just crossing my fingers that the boards I had would be enough. I used a think kerf ripping blade (0.070″ thick) to minimize the waste and that helped.

 

ripping setup

Part of what made the whole process take so long was resetting the featherboard for every cut. Because the boards are all slightly different widths and I could only put one or two boards on the infeed support at one time, the featherboard setting changes every time. I’m using the dark coloured featherboard in the mitre track just to support the back edge of the long featherboard which is actually supporting the work. The mitre track featherboard doesn’t work with the fence that close to the blade as the fingers are too long.

 

outfeed setup

I’m using the sections of the strongback for infeed and outfeed tables to support the boards as I’m ripping them. I’ll set the router table up in a similar fashion so once the strips are fully machined I can put the strongback together.