I picked one up from Lee Valley, I think the 38 inch one was what I went with. Hopefully it will help me build longer straight edges too. Been reading the documents Jim gave me and some directions from the Anarchists Tool chest.
I have another question for all you gentlemen. I was able to make some good progress this week putting bevels onto the bottom of my tabletop. I have a question about using a scrub (or foreplane, cambered jack etc) with the grain. For the most part it went swimmingly, but I hit an issue around a knot that I have in the edge of my board. In the picture you can see I filled it in with Epoxy. There were two of them, each about an inch deep. One was within 4 inches of the edge where I did the bevel. My issue was the weird grain direction caused the scrub plane to 'knick' the tissue in that area instead of taking it out in clean bands. I assume the best solution to this would be don't use a board with knots. But I'm sort of learning as I go. I assume if I ever hit this situation in the future, swap to a finer cutting tool for that section to avoid the tear out. Luckily the tear out won't be visible from normal viewing angles.
tear-out.jpg
Here is a quick pick of the progress. I'm done with the rough bezels on all 4 sides now. I just need to clean it up and get everything to the perfect depth. Doing the last bit of work with my 5 1/2. It took a lot of work but it was a ton of fun doing this part. Seeing it come together is quite the feeling.
bevels1.jpg
So I had some trouble with my initial glue up. The edge jointing was perfect everywhere except this one spot. The plan is to to tape off the bevel along the joint, flip the top, and fill it with a small amount of epoxy. I really should have used more than 5 bar clamps when I glued this entire thing up, but it was what I had.
edge-jointing-issue.jpg