[THE GITS]

Hello spearos

Things have been a bit slow in the workshop, changeable weather isn't a good time to play around with pieces that need to be a straight as we need this to be. Maybe I have been a bit too careful but I can not apologise for that. But now let's move forward to the next stage.

Last time we had glued a thin strip of Mahogany to the side of our blank to act as a datum edge. Due to the length of time this had been left I ran the bench plane over the top surface of the barrel to clean off any surplus glue and any protruding Mahogany. This is also a useful way we may sheck the straightness of the blank. Good news, the top edge had remained perfectly straight since we last left it. Now we must think about making the outside edge of the Mahogany strip parallel to the centre line of the tapered gun blank. Firstly the centre line of the middle tapered laminate was found and marked. then using a calliper the position of the outside edge was marked with extreme care at both the front and the back of the gun. Then with almost as much care the position at the centre of the gun was marked. Now using a straight edge a line was marked using a marking knife. The purpose of this line in not one that we will plane to but only as a rough visual guide.

Now we will plane away the exess wood away to give us a precision surface from which to work from. Fix the blank held on the bench on its side with the Mahogany strip uppermost and the muzzle end towords the back of the bench so we plane down through the grain. It helps when we plane long flat surfaces to use the longest plane we have. In my case this is a Record No7 22" long & 2 3/8" wide, a huge tool but this has been my plane of choice for many years even on pieces smaller than itself. At first we can remove thick shavings so to reduce the time involved removing waste. Starting at the butt of the gun and slowly moving the start point of the cut towards the muzzle plane away the waste until we are very close to the marked line. At this stage we reduce the thickness of our shaving to give us a little more precision. Now the only two points that are of concern are the original two marks we made with precision. plane away the wood carefully until these two marks until they are split by the plane. We now have the front and back exactly right but the middle of the blank is still an unknown. To flaten between our two points we must further reduce the thickness of our shaving until the plane removes only a gossemer thin wisp. Because the bench plane is perfectly flat, I flatten mine every 6 months and the cut is so thin we can plane between the front and back points until no more shavings can be removed. This will leave a near perfect flat surface, simple. One thing we must do throughout the whole of the above procedure is to regularly check the surface's squareness to the top datum surface. We are now ready for the next step.