Cutting strips

Well it has been awhile since my last post as progress has slowed a bit.  I did meet a small milestone and that is I ripped all of the strips.

I purchased the wood from Hiawatha Lumber in Minneapolis, MN.  They've got a lot of beautiful cuts of wood and I think it was pretty reasonably priced.  I purchased clear vertical grain western red cedar and some clear redwood.  All of the boards were 1x6's and had various lengths.

They did have long ones available (16+ ft) but I didn't have a good way to get these long boards home so the longest I purchased was some 12 footers.  The remainder were either 8's or 10's.  The total cost was just over $350 for about 80 lineal feet.  If my calculations are correct, this should be enough to cover my kayak.  Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of the wood prior to ripping it so you will have to use your imagination to envision what a pile of 1x6's looks like sitting on the floor of my shop.

Ripping:
So using my thin rip table saw jig (see previous post), I set up the saw so that I ripped the strips to 0.263 or very close to that.  I chose to go just a hair thicker than 0.25 to make sure the cove and bead come out nice.  Yea, I do have a little variation as I had to move my fence for each cut but in general I would say the strips are between 0.260 and 0.268.  I know this because I took measurements with my caliper throughout the cutting process to make sure things were not moving around on me.

My table saw setup with and outfeed table and "slide" for the strips.

Another shot of the ripped strips

Here is another shot of the ripped strips.  You can see the difference in color between the redwood and the red cedar.  The redwood is the left pile.  Also, I was slightly amazed to see the amount of saw dust which was generated.  Oh well, it will make some good mulch or a great fire starter.

Finally,  ripping completed!

I also have a video of me cutting the strips but I have to cut down the file size.  I'll get this posted shortly.

In total I probably had 3 to 4 hours into ripping these.  Before I began this project, I was thinking that ripping the strips would be a challenge but now that it is complete, it turned out to be pretty simple.  Once I got the saw set up, it became a routine of cutting the boards, moving the fence, cutting the boards, moving the fence....and so on.

My 3M product usage count stays at 12.  I didn't use any during this stage of the build and I don't anticipate any until I get to actually installing the strips on the forms.

Next up is routing the cove and bead on the strips.  The shouldn't be too bad as I already have my router set up to cut the beads.  One by one I will get through these, until next time....