taper jig

[lockon]

Along the lines of Piper's post... those of you who make your own lams - how do you taper your lam? I've got several ideas - but don't like any of them so far.

[Kanga]

I brought some sleds off Kenny .001 and .002 taper.

Just sit the lam on the sled and run it through the drum sander till I have the thickness I want.

[Jason Scott]

I think a lot of people do like Kanga. I made a lam grider similar to the one Sam Harper has on his website using a table sander. Then I bought two .001 tapers from three rivers. I use a spot of hot melt glue to hold my parallel to the taper or tapers and run it through the sander. I use both tapers if I am after a .002 taper and one for a .001.

[Pennsyltuckey pete]

I use the taper trick too.

[kennym]

An appropriate taper sled(.001,.002 etc) and a sander with a conveyor feed works best.

But, it is possible to make them with about any sander with varying degree of accuracy.

[sw]

We use a belt fed thickness sander. Using already known tapers i can kick a set of new tapers out in about 7 minutes, from board to tapers. Honestly the only real difference as you go from say Sam harpers build to an internet build to a store bought professional machine is how many lams you can kick out in a given time. When i first started it took about 90 minutes to kick out a set of longbow lams and tapers on a sander, now using a belt fed machine with micro ajustments the same lams take about 20 minutes to kick out the same 5 lams to make a longbow and are repeatable within .002".

Sam Harpers write up on the lam grinder is a good one - i used that before building a thickness sander and then after some years i spent 1700.00 for a professional machine. But if your going to build a lot of bows - a production thickness sander is the way to go. If not the sander or drill press methods work great and are reasonably accurate.

Dave

[Jason Scott]

Yeah, I don't have a belt feeder and sometimes if I am not steady in spead and pressure it will dig a little deaper in one spot. I just make sure that when I get realy close to the final pass that I focus or I will have to do that one over. And if that happens I may loose my matched pair and have to do the pair over.