: If you are goingto plane them down , I wonder if doing the scarf first would
: result in a uniform thickness after planeing. I've been using butt joints
: with square edges but the next boat is going to be scarf joint with
: bead&cove.

: Greg

What does one do when trying to scarf? In most cases, are we not trying to take a short board and make it appear to be longer? So what's important here? In all cases we want to make a good face and nice joint, but what about color, character and grain?

The best one can do w/ scarfing 2 boards(before ripping into strips) is to take the 2 adjacent ones exactly as they come off the saw, lay them flat, offset them 2 feet and cut the opposite angles in the ends, psuedo book match them over and the grain matches in the middle w/ more error as one reaches the sides. But when ya rip the strips the grain will NOT match. This will give color and maybe character.

If you look at George's post (he means LONGITUDINAL bookmatching) in this set or some of my posts in other scarfing sets, you'll see that one ALSO has the ability to match the GRAIN. Just take any 2 adjacent strips as you rip them off the board and in the exact same orientation that they were ripped offset them by 2 in, sand(cut or plane or whatever) the scarf using the edges as the angle guide( as soon as you sand down to the ends the scarf is perfect). Then keeping the scarfed end of the top strip as a fold point, unfold the top strip so the scarfs match. The two inside surfaces are up. The grain at the surface runs perfectly (the ripping kerf brings in some error) right thru from one strip into the other so that it appears as one board.

[To be totally stupid, and using thin (say 1/8in or especially the same as the ripping saw thickness), you could take a 2foot long board, rip it into strips and unfold and scarf back and forth zig-zag thru the whole width(say it was 3in wide after cutting) and get a strip 24feet long in which the grain was CONTINUOUS.(I'm not suggesting it - the color and grain wave would set up a pattern - hmm)]

So when scarfing is to simulate one board, why would you do it any other way???

Or to match colour and character is this not a simple no brainer way?

-mick