Thread: A little help with scales?

My wife is a vice principal at the local middle school and they have a wood shop. I talked to the shop teacher and he invited me over to use the equipment to cut my Brazilian Ipe. Most shop teachers are pretty stoked about helping out folks with small projects.

If your wood has a highly figured grain then you might be taking a risk trying to run small pieces of it through a thickness planer. A much safer approach would be to bandsaw the slices and then send them through a thickness SANDING MACHINE to take them down to what you need.

hand planing such thin pieces is not very easy.

If they tend more toward 3/8 you could get a set from each section.

If it were me, I would cut an oversize approximate scale, or maybe the smallest rectangle the design required. scribe a center line with a marking gauge and hand saw.

This way you are not ripping or planning the full 3x9 inch, going from a very tricky test of skill to an easy 2 minute delight in frugality.

A scale is thin and small, true, but now it is so small that you can mount the plane as a stationary tool, sole up and pull the material across the fine set blade.