page17
page 53
Bamboo Journal
Italian Bamboo Rodmakers Association
I suggest, at least once, that you carefully gather
all that you have sanded away and that you
weight it on a scale with 0.1 grams resolution.
Knowing the strip surface you will be happy to
discover that you sanded out the irst 2 or 3
mils from the bamboo surface, and the exposed
power ibers will be very thin.
The post gluing operations are the most impor-
tant; they are the ones that generate the
inished strips. I forgot to mention something
important. The strips are baked before gluing
them to the shaping bar. Therefore the strips are
planed to measure in one shot. Therefore, the
procedure is very fast as it is done in one
session only.
I should add that you will beneit from an
important advantage that Moss forgot to
discuss. You will plane bamboo glued to a
wooden bar and as a consequence the bamboo
is so to speak “frozen”, and it will not move,
delect or jam under the plane. It is like sawing
frozen ish with a belt saw. You will discover
that planing glued bamboo is much easier, and
in the initial phases you can remove shavings of
0.2 or 0.3 mm without dificulty.
The 1 5/8” blade is wide enough to cover both
strips at the beam edges, and it would seem an
advantage to plane them both simultaneously. It
can be done, but I prefer to work one strip at a
time, using long and even passes and trying to
keep the height of the strips above the beam
equal.
The beam must be blocked with some type of
clamping method that will not disturb the edges
(remember, the gluing is fragile). Below there is
a photo of what I use. The clamps are the single
hand operation and useful because you will
need to block and unblock quite often.
I suggest you use two planes and on each one
place adhesive tape to cover half of the sole
lengthwise.
One on the right and the other on the left.
The idea is to plane a strip at a time, basically
using the groove method at the reverse.
Leave the strips 3 or 4 mils proud of the beam
surface. Keep checking with a blade and proper
lighting how the work proceed. See photo.
At the end the Lie Nielsen, 212 scraping plane
comes into action. The very ine setting of the
protrusion of the blade can be done by exploi-
ting a precious characteristic of the adjustable
bed scraping planes. Fine tuning is done
without unblocking the blade, but changing the
angular setting of the blade by operating on the
two spin wheels in push-pull. If the protrusion
is around one mil or so, something magic
happens.