DougP

great find! this bit should be made available from Stew Mac.

for the most part 13" is enough. i have to send the bigger items through before i glue them up. the jump from 13" to 15" is more than i could afford right now.

i recently bought the 735 and it has been great. infeed/outfeed tables are available for it for around $50. i was told that DeWalt didnt include them because they expected more people to build larger more permanent tables for it. its a "portable" planer but it does weigh about 90 pounds. i dont currently have any infeed/outfeed tables on it and i get a slight amount of snipe every now and then. i attribute that to operator sloppiness more than to the machine.

i have found that the cheaper the spokeshave or plane, the more truing it will need. i have a $25 stanley spokeshave that i couldnt get to work right at all. i bought a book on how to build and true planes and spokeshaves and now i can rough out a neck in about 30 minutes with that spokeshave. a lot of the same info can be found on the internet as well. i still have a lingering feeling that the nicer spokeshaves from Veritas et al would be worth the money though as i have one of their block planes and it is a dream to work with.

i'll take a 1/2" or 3/4" piece also. i am in Reston and could pick up to save shipping costs.

Mike Tobias does some ash necks. http://www.austinbasstraders.com/_inventor...635-24-ash.html if you roll over the pic on the left, the pic will change to show the back.

I use the micro-plane. i have been really impressed with their products. i tried a Robo-Sander and it wasnt for me, so i got the micro-plane. so far i have used two blades on two guitar bodies and two guitar necks with no tear out at all. i try to bandsaw up to about 1/8" away from the line then micro-plane the rest of the way to save from wearing the blades out, but maple is pretty hard on them. they take just a few minutes to get use to. they do act like planes so if you try to drive it too hard into rising grain they can start to kick. but even when it kicked on me none of my bodies or necks were damaged. to help prevent flex, i bring the drill press table up to about 1/32" below the attachment. if there has to be a negative for these then its: hard woods can dull them pretty quick and the replacement blades are about 8 bucks.

i didnt intend for my post to come out that way, my apologies to low end fuzz for the sarcasm. thanks for the correction on the radius. i'm still learning all this myself.

not be an a$$ but they are called radius blocks because thats how they are measured and made. as nitefly said, they are probably over bent and meant to go on a 7 1/4" radius fretboard. cant help ya in the UK part. you might check Stew Mac if you hadnt already.

i usually try to sucker my roommate into opening them in exchange for a beer. when i was in high school woodshop many moons ago i was shown the method of coiling by using your foot and the floor as jer7440 mentioned.

on PCs, Sonar is my software of choice. its the most intuitive piece of software that i have used. i couldnt figure out Live, Cubase or Traktion within 5 minutes of installing their demos so i skipped them and went to Sonar which was sort of self-explanatory to me. since i have moved to Mac, GB3 and Logic Pro are my environments. I really wish that Sonar was available for Macs though.

though not exactly ultra dense wood, i used my 9" on a 1.75" thick body blank of swamp ash with no problem at all. which bearings are you guys talking about? the guide bearings or the wheel bearings? either way at $70 bucks, i would just buy a new 9" and keep the old one for spare parts. or tear it apart and make some kind of super powered Lego truck with the motor.

i agree. i had read a lot of reviews about it before i bought mine. i knew it had significant limitations in a guitar building shop so i am not letting those influence me into saying that its a POS. it does what it was designed for very well.

Here is a quick first impression of the 9 " model. its the SM400 (i Think) from Delta. It was very easy to set up. i broke one of the guide blocks while setting it up, but thats one of the parts that i have read numerous times about needing upgrading. i rough cut two necks the other day with it. luckily, i wasnt trying to do precision work with it because the supplied blade was all over the place. but my intention was to rough out the excess wood, my Robo Sanders will do the detail work. The other major upgrade that is always commented on is the supplied blade. maybe that had something to do with the bad blade wander. i have two new blades on order right now, so we'll see if those make a difference. personally, i would have no problems dropping hundreds on a quality tool but i live in an apartment and have no shop other than my balcony so the little Delta was just about my only option. as long as it does what i require (rough cutting) then i will be happy with it.

sweet! Congrats. i just bought the 9 inch model yesterday. got it all put together and it was running fine on my kitchen counter. is there any difference in the ShopMaster version as compared to the older non-Shopmaster branding? or is just an added name?