Kerfing plane continued

The kerfing plane is sort of done. I did some bad thinking and ended up with a less than elegant shape for the handle, but it works better than it looks. 

In the first picture you can see the kerf I made along one edge of a board. 

Tom Fidgen adapted his to have an adjustable fence, and that is of course useful. Mine is set to slightly more than 3 mm and that is fine for uke body material, but a bit thin for fretboards. 

Here you can see how I rip the board after putting a kerf around all edges. 

Believe it or not, but this rip saw has been subject to ridicule from my daughter Li. I can't see why. 

New tool, a kerfing plane

I saw the best series of youtube vids, from Tom Fidgen. He has some great ideas about resawing by hand, and shows how he builds a frame saw and a "kerfing plane". An image search will show you his. 

My large bandsaw is broken, and I did buy that Pax rip saw for resawing. But scoring the perimeter with a gauge hasn't been enough to guide the saw perfectly. The advantage of the kerfing plane is that it cuts a deeper kerf at a set distance from the face of the board, and that kerf guides whichever saw you use for ripping. 

Oh well - you see where this is leading don't you. 

I am building my own kerfing plane. 

Even though I have other stuff to do. 

New resonators on their way

I found some plywood of the same kind I used for the first six reso ukes, and even better - I found the router templates!

My band saw is still up the creek (I can't find a damn driving belt short enough) so I roughed out the contours with a jig saw. 

Next step will be (and I write this down for myself so I won't forget it) attaching the template for the outer edge and running it against a flush cut router bit. The router will be mounted in a table. 

Then half of the blanks will get the large hole for the soundwell routed out, and the rest will get to keep a cross to strengthen the back. 

Then the top halves will get another layer of plywood... Or will they get that even before the contour is cut flush? Oh my, I don't remember how I did it last time. I'll have to check my own blog to see if I took any pics of the proceedings then.