This is my tablesaw set up for cutting the tapers for making scarf joints. It works well for pieces for my skin on frame boats but also for making pieces for spars for a little sailboats and what not. It cuts a 16 to 1 taper which is what I prefer for anything structural.
The jig is normally just a piece of a 2 x 6 cut to a taper but for whatever reason this time I had a heck of a time getting the edge perfectly square even using my track saw so I gave up and screwed the tapered 2×6 to a rectangular 1×6 at an angle and ran the whole thing through the table saw to square the edge up that way. It worked great and when I was done, I just scribed the tapered side onto the 1×6 and then cut that angle with my track saw giving me a 3/4 inch taller jig than normal which gave me a cleaner, reference edge for the tablesaw, and also supported the work piece better. I think this is how I’m gonna build these from now on.
Most important thing about making longer boards out of shorter boards is to make sure that the boards are perfectly straight with no curve and no crown because the scarfing process tends to magnify those issues. It’s also important to match grain and appearance if you want your boards to flex evenly which matters in my type of boatbuilding. Also, if I’m building a pair of Gunnels out of two 1×6 boards that I split in half I would never glue the piece that came from the same board to itself, but rather the piece from the opposite board on both gunnels, once again, to ensure symmetry and even flex.
This is a super quick, clean way to scarf although obviously it won’t work for wider boards. The only thing I don’t like is how the offcut ejects backwards at the user. I wonder if this is one of those cases where a splitter would stop that from happening?
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
