Today I bought a nice board of White Oak from Windsor Plywood.
I knew I needed to make some cuts that would require a fair bit of stability. When I was a kid, my dad would use lots of feather boards and other jigs he would make to make good cuts.
So I started off the day by making a couple feather boards.
The first one I made was from a cross cut piece, so it ended up not having much strength before a piece cracked off; but it was still useful, the second was from a more suitable piece of scrap. This proved to be quite valuable to the cuts I was about to make.
http://imgur.com/oREFBEq
I made successive cuts, one cross-cut to get a piece down to working length, one to get a nice clean edge to go against the guard (the small offcut piece from that will later be used for structural ribs).
The remaining piece I ripped down into the depth of the ukulele ( 2 5/8").
I then set up another vertical rip half-way through that piece at a width of ~4mm, flipped the board and did the other half. I didn’t get a great cut, but it was passable. I cleaned it up on the benchtop belt sander and got the saw marks out of the board. It is now approximately 2.5-3mm thick after sanding.
The consistency isn’t great, but I’m going to use this as a bending prototype. If this goes well I’ll make the 5mm rough cuts (or even 6mm) and rent a thickness planer from the VTL and clean them all up in one go.
http://imgur.com/kZtbnRp
http://imgur.com/lO0TJJq
http://imgur.com/ZpaZjyQ
Here you can see the piece I’ve cleaned up on the sander and will be my first steaming test. I’ll probably either hand-plane it a bit to thin it out, or sand it some more; as it is slightly too thick/
http://imgur.com/GZUpTBq
http://imgur.com/7nuzaya
I also sanded some high spots out of the jig caused by some slight misalignment in the layers:
http://imgur.com/2MVwORM
And finally, today I picked up a tea kettle that should prove to be a good steam source for the ammo box (ammo box not pictured).
I need to figure out a way to attach a hose attachment to the top of the kettle, and one on the other side of the hose to attach to the ammo box.
http://imgur.com/4oVS2E9
Next Step… a test bend.