Billabong Art of Shaping 2009

When all 17 stringers were in place, I next needed to install the "sun" which needed to be mechanically accurate so free handing it was out of the question. I have several professional big routers so I made a template to route the curve accurately into the blank. The replacement piece of foam needed to be a true arc, but 3/32 nds smaller in diameter to accommodate the redwood stick that would separate it, kind of like an annulus, from the rest of the design. This was accomplished but taking a piece of old Walker Foam and shaping it to the same curve and gluing it, along with the wood into the blank. Once it was time to get to work with the planer, the very nature of the design had its own problems; the stringer layout made the blank very flexy in the center and the amount of stringers as well as the varied angles was another concern for the blades. The blank had to be balanced over my shaping stands in a particular way to help control the flex. To control the stringer blow outs or splintering I used the regular planer with newly sharpened blades to rough out the board and then I pulled out the carbide grit planer again to do all the finish work. The decision to actually put saw to foam was the first obstacle, but as my dearly departed father said to me many times, "The devil hates a coward.” The first few cuts were easy, but as I started to go "around the corner" this was where difficulty started to step into the picture. There was no easy way to use clamps on this layout. I have 6,8 and 10 foot pipe clamps and by butting them against the tips of the already glued sticks, I could get a bite on the nearly straight outline.