Tips, Discoveries, and so called trade secrets

[thefishinmusician]

If it's fine with Frank, is this forum open to sharing tips and stuff..Like,where do you acess the truss rod adjustment on a Tama 12 string??? Hint...look under the nut...

[Bob Webster]

I'm a classical builder and so I have need to thin strips of veneer to specific thicknesses on a regular basis. What got me started was having a burning desire to make use of boxwood rather than maple for purflings, where the only source of boxwood I could find was LMII's boxwood bindings. I knew I could slice them up crudely with my Proxxon saw but after that? I fished around for ideas but most of the methods I saw relied on rather complicated little devices for pushing/pulling the strip under a fixed scraper blade. Not very satisfying.

I ended up with something that I'm very proud to say is just about as low tech as one could imagine and it works just right. I wanted some strips around 0.8mm thick so I thinned some acrylic to that using my Performax, a backer board, and double sided tape. I cut a pair of strips ~10mmX30mm, established a gap of ~10mm between them by taping them on the bench, and then taped on a utility blade perpendicular to them at the midpoints of the strips. Now I had a scraper blade that was the right distance up off ;the bench.

Now I just clamp the crude boxwood strips onto the bench and run the blade on its little skis over the strips until no more wood is removed. I've ventured as thin as 0.4mm using the Mark II device in which the acrylic strips are replaced ;with your choice of thicknesses from a pair of dismantled auto feeler gauges. Oh, and of course, both devices are reversible and offer almost total flexibility of blade angle.

Cheers,
Bob

P.S. My two favorite tools are my cabinet scraper, which I'd marry if it could make good hashed browns, and the very thin double sided tape from Stew-Mac which has alot less squirm to it than carpet tape. Oh yeah, and Hot Stuff extra gap filling CA for one pass pore filling. Is anyone courageous enough to start a thread on pore filling?