In my US History class, we were handed a sheet with several project options. I immediately moved toward the model plane one. “Extra credit for handcrafted models”... you know what that meant. Here’s the result. For the most part, I just rough cut everything on the bandsaw and sanded the heck out of it. The body and wings are just 2×4s, with the body being 2 of them laminated together. I did this at my cabin shop of course, but when I brought it home, the pine cracked a little due to air temp/humidity changes. No big deal, I just dabbed a little glue in the cracks and sanded them clean. The propeller is cherry. The little wheels are just store bought, I don’t currently have a lathe to turn them myself. The most difficult part to the whole thing was gluing all of those pieces together.The most fun part was shaping and sanding the propeller. Hope you like it!

My Central Machinery 9” bandsaw didn’t come with a fence to begin with, so ever since I got it I’ve been trying to find a decent solution. I’m not a fan of just clamping a board onto the table, since that is a pain to square up or compensate for drift angles when ripping stock. I tried to rig up a 2×4 with a t-square like setup, but that ended up just being clamped (back to square 1). I tend to do most of my rip cuts on the bandsaw since I’m still a little bit wary of cheap, flimsy table saws, which is all I have (hopefully upgrading soon). This fence design involves putting a whole new table onto the bandsaw, so I figured I would make it as big as I practically can. With it, I filled in the space between the table and the “chassis” of the saw. I routed a 5/8” dado into the front of it to accept a miter gauge I had laying around. This allows me to set the fence at any angle to compensate for blade drift. I took the fence part off of the gauge and drilled a hole in the bar underneath it to accommodate a bolt to lock it down, which goes through a 1/4” slot in the 5/8” dado. The plywood fence is only held on by some spring clamps for now, but I plan to get some more lag screws to mount it on the miter gauge. The whole table, made of 1/2” pine plywood, mounts onto the existing table with some lag screws in the back and a wood screw in the front that acts as a stop when sliding the table on. There is a miter bar from another spare miter gauge on the bottom of the table that is used to accurately place the table onto the existing one. I really like this design for its functionality and ease of adjustment. The design isn’t entirely mine, however, and I got the idea from this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgytcjbE708. I’d recommend this design for anyone having the same fence issues as me. The entire jig took me about 1 1/2 hours to make.

By the way, some of you may have seen this pop up in the blogs, which is where I posted it accidentally. It has been removed and placed here.