One of the problems I've been having with my strips is getting precise scarfs by hand. The long strips are tough to seat well in the miter box I'd built, and on a through-the-edge scarf that's 2" long even a little inprecision means bad joints. I haven't seen this particular solution on the forums, so I thought I'd offer it up as an option for those who hate cutting scarf joints.

My power miter saw cuts extremely cleanly but only lets me cut a 50 degree angle perpendicular to the blade, which is basically the same as a butt joint. To cut a long scarf (around 1-in-10) I needed a way to position my strips perpendicular to the blade.

The attached pic shows my solution, which is working *extremely* well. I used a 12" X 14" piece of melamine I had sitting around, with a positioning board nailed perpendicular to the saw fence and a piece of cedar positioned upright on one end to aid in clamping. The saw is then set at 10 degrees, which is effectively 80 degrees on a perpendicular strip.

This took a few minutes to make, but now lets me bang out scarf joints in just a few seconds. As I'm using 8' strips I need to scarf nearly every one, and so this is a major time saver. In addition, the joints are machine-perfect, so appearance is improved as well.