Here are the first round of top braces on the go bar deck. As many of you may have read I do a number of sash joints on the top and back brace of my guitars. These are tight lightweight joints with a lot of precision cuts and miters.
One hand powered tool that I have found immensely helpful for this type of precision cut is the Bridge City Jointmaker Pro. It is based around a long Japanese blade mounted under a sliding table that you clamp your piece to. You then slide the table on it's lateral bearings across the blade.
You have several controls for the blades:
When you loosen the top knob you can angle the blade 45 degrees in either direction. The crank below sets how high the blade sits which determines the depth of the cut.
You can measure that but simple pushing a rule out to the highest point of the blade:
So this is a hand powered table saw. What is the advantage of that?
The first advantage is accuracy. With the precision fence you can easily set the stops to the thousandths of an inch:
You are making a vibration free cut off on a stationary blade so the cut surface is a finished surface with no tear out. There are a number of blades available with different teeth per inch and blade thicknesses, including a gauged blade for doing fret slots.
The second advantage is you are cutting without heat. So when you are slicing a .040" piece of your prime Ironwood burl for purfling it won't get hot and crack on you. If you are cutting fret slots you are not making the slot edges brittle buy cooking the wood with a hot blade.
Third advantage is there is only the noise of the fine gauge saw cutting wood no dust collector needed. What little saw dust there is basically just falls on the catch below.
Fourth advantage is it won't throw your work at you or jerk it around and cut your fingers off.
I am constantly finding new applications for the hand tool and loving the improvements along the way.