: Hi Rob,

: Ok, I'll try to remember this :)

: Bill H.

I haven't done a stripper yet but last year I needed to cut and bevel some strips for a hollow mast. They were cut from the edge of a slash-cut plank to get the vertical grain direction I wanted. I cut the bevels first using a hand-held router with a saddle guide running along the edge of the plank, then cut the strip using a skilsaw. Very quick and easy, and the bevels were clean, ready for gluing.

I was cutting 1" wide strips from a 1-1/2" thick plank. The bevel was cut with extra depth to reduce the strip width from 1-1/2" to what I wanted at the same time. Theoretically, with a 22.5 deg bevel on both sides, for an 8-sided mast, increasing the depth by x" takes 2.x.sin(22.5)" off the width of the strip, but in practice I didn't do the math, I just lowered the cut until the first strip was right.

This may be of help others like me who don't have enough space to use a table saw. A saddle guide for a router is easy to make; replace the plastic baseplate with a ply one, glue a guide with one edge on the centerline, add another alongside it, held on by screws running in slots cut into the ply baseplate, and adjust for a snug fit over the plank edge. I have lots of custom guides for my routers and spare ply baseplates handy when I need them.