[southern_spearo]

Very interesting. I have a series of questions (which I will do one at a time).

First question
The quality of your joinery is very high. My father would have approved - which is very high praise indeed since he was a perfectionist.

I normally tend to use a small Lie Nielson block plane for speargun stuff, and if I want to take off more wood, I go to a small power planer. I have been looking at thicknessers in the hardware shops with an acquisitive eye. But after reading the posts I went back to my garage, dug out my father's old Marples bench plane, cleaned it, oiled it and sharpened and set the blade (and fiddled with the mysterious frog setting too).

I tried it and it does cut cleanly and take a very measured amount of wood off. The gun I am currently building is a mix of oregon and Huon pine. The Huon pine cuts very cleanly. The aroma of the shaved Huon pine is lovely when cut by a hand plane. The power planer must burn it a little and degrade the aroma. So there is satisfaction in using hand tools.

But that is not what I want to ask about. My question is "Do you really need to hand plane the laminates if they have been run over by a thicknesser, or is that complicating the matter unduly?" I have successfully laminated wood that has only been cut on a bench saw. The joins are not perfect hair-lines, but nobody but a professional joiner would notice, and the epoxy fills all gaps.

Ric

------------------------------------------------------------

Ric Fallu started spearfishing on the southern shores of Australia in the 1960s, and never really stopped. His other passion is crafting spearguns.