Flying on the Cheap - Wood

wrote:

Fred is bucking additional headwinds in that he has zero woodworking
experience, doesn't own a table saw and has only a limited amount of
shop space.

I've never had a table saw of my own either. I now have a little 9
inch Delta bandsaw though, and I find for this sort of light-duty
resawing, I like it rather better than a table saw, in part because the
smaller kerf means less wood reduced to powder in the conversion of
"white wood" shelves into longerons or rib sticks. Lots of sawmills
use bandsaws - big, scarey ones - for sawing balks into finished
lumber.

Making up a scarfing fixture tends to drive a lot of homebuilders crazy
as they fiddle and tweak, ..... This degree of accuracy
can be achieved using nothing more complicated than fixtures assembled
from scrap wood, one for scarfing solid stock, the other for scarfing
plywood. In each case the wood gets clamped in the fixture and the
same cutter - - a portable circular saw - - is used on both.

For the benefit of the readers, here are a few scarfing web pages for
inspection.

http://www.marisystems.com/ellipticat/page4.htm I've used one very
much like this with a hand plane, after roughing the cut with a
japanese saw. Use a fairly large plane, with a lot of plane ahead and
behind to the blade to guide you if you use this method or you'll end
up planing the jig.

That was the only decent link I found on scarfing solid wood.
Scarfing plywood has lots more links, and some of these methods can be
adoped to small stringers - just stack a bunch of them side-by-side,
and they start to look like a sheet of plywood.

http://www.seqair.com/skunkworks/Woo...ig/Gauger.html
for plywood. Gougeon, the WEST epoxy people, sell a device like this
for a Skilsaw that works very well.
http://www.boat-links.com/scarf_bevels.html Free-handing plywood scarfs
http://www.menestrel.org.uk/scarfing_plywood.htm A sander approach.

Finally, "The Gougeon Brothers On Boat Construction" devotes a whole
chapter to scarfing, both dimensional lumber and plywood, and is widely
available in libraries. Other books on wooden boat building may also
cover it, but of the two I've kept from the dozens I used to have, only
this one did.