So the less than stellar rip fence on the table saw doesn’t hold its setting apparently. I found after checking some of my strips that throughout the day the fence had slipped away from the blade and some bundles of strips were thicker than others. So I had to re-rip several bundles of strips to get them all the same thickness. The measurement I was going for was 0.220″ and some of the strips got as thick as 0.260″. Forty thousands of an inch doesn’t sound like much but if the strips aren’t all exactly the same then the bead and cove on the edges won’t be centred on all the strips. Which would make the fairing of the canoe a horrendous job later on.
The good news is that 0.040″ is easily dealt with by the featherboard so once I got the table saw set up (with a clamp on the fence this time) I didn’t have to change it for each strip. So re-ripping the strips only took a third as much time as the first go round.
The moral of the story is check your strips every so often to make sure the fence hasn’t moved. It would have saved much more time to catch the problem early and clamp the fence then. Or maybe the moral of the story is to use a table saw with a good reliable rip fence… ?
