It took me two attempts at making this fence.  The first attempt was using some plywood I picked up at one of the “big box” stores, near my house.  I will never buy plywood at one of the “big box” stores ever again.  I thought I leaned my lesson a while ago, but I found myself driving there to pick up a small piece for this project.  Every piece of plywood I have ever bought at one of the “big box” stores is never flat or will stay flat.

After spending Saturday making the first fence, and not having it come out square or flat, I decided to head out to Woodcraft to pick up a small piece, of nice Baltic Birch plywood.  I could have saved some money buying a whole sheet at one of my other suppliers, but I really don’t have the room to store the leftovers.

My plan for the fence was to use T-track to mount it to my existing fence.  I drilled a couple holes through the fence, and used a couple T-bolts and knobs.

I laminated 2 pieces of ¾” plywood, to make the fence.  I’m hoping the extra thickness will help it stay flat and to make it more solid.  I then cut a dado in the laminated fence for the T-track.

Even though I went through the effort to make sure my fence was square to the table, after test fitting the fence it wasn’t quite square.  I needed to add a “shim” to square it up.  It turned out to be the thickness of on layer of blue tape.  The blue tape won’t last too long; I’ll find a “permanent” shim later.

I added some ribs to the back, to help keep the fence square and to add more support.  The fence feels rock solid now.

I did a few test cuts, and I’m getting pretty results.  Next weekend I’ll put the fence to work, when I do a test glue-up of one of the armrests.

Review – Setting the drift angle on your fence

When resawing, especially when cutting thin veneers, setting the drift angle is an important process to complete.  I’ve had some people tell me this process isn’t needed with “modern” blades, but my experience has found the opposite to be true.  It’s a simple process, so why not take every advantage you can to get the best results.

There are many approaches to finding and setting the drift angle.  The simplest and quickest, is a technique I saw on Laguna’s web site.  I went over this process in a past post, but Laguna has a great video that explains and shows the process.  It take me about 5 minutes to adjust my fence, for the drift angle.

This is a quick an easy project to knock out. You can customize the projection stops to the angles and honing guide you use. I’ve only set up a few so far, but I have room to add others. I gave it a test run today, and it worked great. I like the compact size. It’s easy to store and to travel with, when I take classes.

A few words on different sharpening techniques.  There are many different techniques out there on how to sharpen, and I’ve tried many of them.  It has always been a goal of mine to develop my freehand sharpening skills.  The problem I ran into, I don’t sharpen on a regular basis.  Meaning I’m not working in my shop on a constant basis.  I could go months between needing to sharpen a tool.  This made it difficult to maintain my freehand sharpening shills.  David’s approach might not be as fast as freehand sharpening, but it’s pretty darn quick and repeatable.  When it comes to sharpening repeatability is key.  The stops on the bench hook are what make this approach repeatable.  These stops, set your angle projects dead on every time.  This makes resharpening fast and reliable.

David has several DVDs on sharpening, that go into great detail on his approach.  It’s much more than this bench hook concept.  If you want to learn more about his approach, you can find those DVDs over at Lie-Nielsen too.

I looked around to try to find a better method or a jig.  Recently Popular Woodworking ran an article on 3 ways to taper legs.  One of these methods intrigued me.  Glen Huey showed how he uses a jointer to taper legs, in only 2 passes.  I thought about using this method, but after looking at my jointer I realized my jointer infeed table was too short for the length of the legs I had.  Check out his video, it’s pretty amazing.

Then I was over at Fine Woodworking and came across an article and video by Richard W. Beebe.  This jig as a little more complicated, but had some features that made 4-way tapers much easier.

Building the jig wasn’t that difficult.  The only interesting part of the project was cutting the circular slot for the indexing pin attachment.  Here’s how I set it up to cut with the router.

As you can see, I just added a piece of MDF to my router table, where my router bit can come through.  I then marked the radius I needed and drilled a hole for a nail to act as the pivot point.  I added a couple stop blocks and made the cut, in a couple passes.

The adjustable fence and the clamping arm are the key to this jig.  The fence allows you set the jig for any angle and for any length of leg.  The clamping arm gives very firm clamping pressure on the leg.  I never had any issues with a leg wanting to move.

The indexing pin attachment isn’t required for the jig, but is a nice feature.  It allows you to rotate the leg around a center point, without needed to move the fence if you are doing a 3 or 4-way taper.

In this picture, I only firmly pressed the leg against the pin.  This worked ok, but on some cuts there can be a little vibration.  In subsequent cuts, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the leg and inserted the pin firmly in the hole.

When you get to the third taper you will notice that the leg doesn’t sit up against the fence anymore.

If you aren’t using the indexing pin, all you have to do is readjust the fence for the difference.  If you are using the indexing pin, the pin holds the leg in place without the aid of the fence.

On the forth cut, if you are using the indexing pin, the bottom face is not sitting on jig.

For the most part I didn’t find this to be an issue, but I did experience some vibration during the cut.  This was because the wood isn’t fully supported on the bottom face.  I felt the indexing pin held the leg firmly in place for this cut.  If I were cutting a lot of legs, I probably wouldn’t use the indexing attachment.  I would cut the first 2 faces on each leg.  Then readjust the fence and cut the last 2 faces on each leg.

I think the time spent making this jig was worth it.  This should be a jig I will use over and over.