Hello,
Let me try to explain why this jig is a good idea.
If I wanted to cut a series of sequential veneers from a thick board I would begin by planing and thicknessing the board, making sure that there was at least one edge square to the face side. If I ran that face against a tall fence to slice off a 1.5mm veneer, that reference face is now gone. Do I resurface that face so it is good to go against the fence again. That loses material which I don't want to do for economy, but more importantly a good book-match becomes less viable, since the grain can move and change quite a bit as leaves are removed from the board.
I could just run the newly sawn side against the fence and the next cut probably wouldn't be too bad. However, successive cuts become less and less reliable from cumulatively exaggerating ripples and wobbles from previous cuts. Such a tall rip done over and over, often takes the board out of square, too, so stability from the edge that runs on the table is lost. That makes ripping errors worse.
For example; I recently wanted to make curved lams for some dining chair top rails. I needed 10 veneers for each lam to give me the finished thickness I wanted and the boards were thick enough to make them all, IF I didn't have to reface the surface that ran against the fence. In any case, I just wanted to reassemble the stack right off the saw to keep the grain on the edges from running out too much. After about 4 rips, with the veneer against the fence, the leaves were just getting too much out of true and I had to face the board on the planer. I ended up only getting 9 veneers and not the nicest surfaces to glue together, either. I ended up thickness sanding them, which made the stack thinner still and I had to add more veneers from another board. The runout along the edge was unacceptable to me, so I ended up making the veneers cut from the offside of the fence. This meant that the good face and edge was always against the fence, and any slight ripping errors in the newly sawn face could not have any effect on the next veneer to be cut. The chore was having to move the fence each time with more or less guessing the kerf that had been lost. There was slight variations in veneer thicknesses, which meant the finished thickness of the curved lams was not predictable. I had 6 chairs to do, so ultimately trying to get all the rails equal became difficult.
What Elisha's device will accomplish will be consistency of the veneers, as kerf allowance will be set and repeatable each time (I had 60 veneers to cut for the job above!) It will also means a better glueing surface, so the stack could be glued more or less straight from the saw. (No more than a card scraper needed) It will reduce waste by virtue of the fact there will be fewer duds and there will be no needless thickness sanding of the leaves nor resurfacing the board to provide a new reference face to bear against the rip fence.
Obviously, other people work in different ways, and if this device is not for them, then fair enough. What is not helpful, is questioning the validity of the jig, because those people do not have a use for it. Elisha requested some feedback about improving the jig, not querying whether the jig has a purpose at all. Many years ago, another student asked for some ideas for an A level Product design project. A jig to do precisely what Elisha's product does was suggested by several posters on here. It most certainly would have applications for some woodworkers and I can certainly see a use for it.
Mike.
