: The plywood is either 3mm or 4mm thick in total. With 25.4 mm to an inch you
: have 3mm plywood coming in at just under 1/8th of an inch thick. A 1/8th
: inch kerf would be bigger than the thickness of the 3mm plywood, and it
: would simply turn your "joint" to a pile of sawdust. If youwere
: working with 4mm plywood, then by very careful centering you could remove
: 1/8th inch of material from the center of the plywood, but you would be
: left with a front and rear veneer face that was so thin as to have
: negligible structural strength.

: As Ted Henry's pictures show, a 1/16th kerf eats out the center layer-- which
: is just under 2mm thick -- and leaves the full thickness of each of the
: face veneers.

: While the wood that you remove has the grain going at right angles to the
: grain on the face veneers, you would not want to use a spline that had the
: same orientation as the center veneer. If you did, your joint could fail
: with jsut gentl flexing of the joined plywood sheets, as the spline would
: split along a grain line (which would be parallel to the edges of the
: joint). Your options therefore are to make splines with the grain running
: in the same direction as the face grain, or to make splines that had grain
: running at an angle -- say 30 to 60 degrees of the angle of the face
: grain.

: ass for stock for the splines, you could use scraps from your 4mm plywood, if
: you have any. Either use a saw to remove the face veneers from your
: scraps, leaving the center core -- which should be the right thickness. Or
: use your saw or power planer to cut through the plywood and reduce it to
: the desired thickness. If you do this you'll have a spline that is made of
: two plies. One will be the outer veneer and the other will be a thinned
: center ply. This can be used at almost any angle or alignment as a spline.
: If you have no scraps of your particular boat plywood, you can use any
: other plywood scraps, or solid wood stock that you might wish to reduce to
: size. If you are working with solid stock, you can use many tiny chips,
: too. Rip a strip to a 1/16th thickness and cut it to length to fit your
: groove, stacking as many of these as it takes to fill the slot.

: Hope this helps.

: PGJ

THIS BULLETIN BOARD IS GREAT.THANKS FOR ALL THE PICTURES AND INSIGHTS.
I WILL PRACTICE A BIT WITH LUAN WOOD AND MAY PROCURE SOME 1/16" HOBBY PLY AND
OR CUT SOME ASH SPLINTS WITH THE GRAIN ORIENTED AT AN ANGLE AS SUGGESTED.

THANKS AGAIN

RMAN