: I've got a honing guide....somewhere. Tried it a couple of times on
: my Scary Sharp set up, couldn't get used to it.
: I've just free-handed my chisels and plane blades . . .

: I made these two edge planes. One for each direction, fits in
: between strips . . .

: And because they're ugly, it'll be easy to make ones that look a
: lot nicer. There's more ugly pictures of them in use on my Flikr
: page.

: Will

Yeah, a honing guide can be fiddley. I have a couple of low angle block planes because I find they get more use than any other hand tool; it's a bit of a pain sharpening them even though it only takes a few strokes so having two usually gets me through a small boat; then I have a big sharpening session for the next . . . will it never end?

The edge planes are neat. I never heard of anything like that. I must try to make one.

When ripping strips one trick is to set the blade a few deg off vertical so the strips have two beveled edges - one is the wrong way round. Now run the strips through a table router to square up one edge. This gets around the problem of finding a router bit that has the angle you need.

I am building a "constant camber" boat at present. It has the same bilge profile end to end, typically a circular arc. If laid correctly the strips all have the same angle bevel end-to-end, so the beveling ideas are useful to me. It is just an experiment to determine if the design limitation has a serious impact on performance.