Good afternoon all-
I've decided to make myself a try square following the plans for the Bridge City version that PW has had on their site for a number of years.
https://22293-presscdn-pagely.netdna...aki_Square.pdf
I'm mentally walking through the operations necessary, and hoping to get some advice on slotting the square body to accept the brass blade.
JE's instructions have you attach a brass wear strip to the wood body, then slot the wood+brass together using a tablesaw. Now, as I'm not going to be using a tablesaw, I've been trying to come up with a way to do it accurately by hand. The blade is 1/8 brass stock, so I'd be looking to cut a slightly undersized slot, then finesse the blade with sandpaper for final fitting.
I have two competing thoughts, neither of which seems particularly well-suited to ease and accuracy. Both would involve *not* attaching either brass strip until the wood is notched, then epoxying the brass on and filing it open as a secondary operation.
So here are my ideas thus far...
1) Saw to one line with a dovetail saw, fix a scraper or a piece of veneer in the DT saw kerf, and saw again, relying in the scraper to push the saw over a little to widen the slot. Keep stuffing additional material in there to keep widening the slot as required. Found this idea on a luthier's forum.
2) Get my hands on a couple floats under 1/8 thick, and use them to cut/widen the notch as needed.
I'm hoping there's a better alternative out there that hasn't occurred to me...
Thanks!
EDIT: To add, option three would be "treat it like an itty bitty mortise, saw both lines and knock out the waste." I'm going to give this a shot in some scrap, but it feels like it's a thin enough notch that sawing to both lines could be troublesome.
EDIT AGAIN: Valid responses to this question include "You're overthinking this" and "That square is designed to be machine made. Doing it by hand is silly"