Cunning conversion...

The last technical article has been written for F&C, which was supposed to be a two page piece on ramped shooting boards. Two pages in the mag though, isn't a whole lot of space to describe how to make one, so having one of my frequent latteraly thinking brain waves, I decided to modify my existing one. The advantage of the ramped shoot is that more of the blade is in contact with the timeber, whereas in the ordinary version, it's only one small section that's in constant use.

The first pic shows my old, battered, tatty and coffee stained shoot... a bit worn but still accurate.

The simplest thing to do to modify the shoot was to saw off the plane runway and re-attach a new one, at an angle of round about 10deg or less. The bench hook end has been chiseled away to the right angle and then it's been fixed in place with a hefty couterbored screw...

...and the addition of a couple of wedges on the under side to level the whole thing up was the final little bit to do. The runway has been extended by around 60mm so that wider boards can be shot in without the No9 falling off the end of the shoot.

It's not happened yet, but with my track record, it's going to happen one day!