Problem cutting beads

[Ben]

Well, I went and had my first oopsie on my Freedom 17-9. I guess that this post is both a question and a warning. When I bought my cedar, about 1/2 was WRC from the local big box stores, and the other 1/2 was EWC that I got from a local lumber yard. I planed the WRC to 0.750", and some of the EWC was already planed to 0.730". so I planed all of the EWC to the same dimension. Since I am keeping each board bundled seperately to match colors, I figured that this would not be a problem. Think again.

I set up my router table to cut beads on the WRC. Typical 4 finger board setup, 2 on top, 2 opposing the fence. I cut the WRC, then cut 1/2 of the EWC. I was making a lot of chips and the fingerboards were barely visible. On one of my strips, I noticed a noticible dip in the bead about 4" from the end. Then on another board. I stopped to see what was going on. I hadn't reset my fingerboards to accomodate the 0.020" smaller EWC. As a result, my EWC strips vary by about 0.010" in width, randomly spaced across the whole strip. There is a noticable dip about 4" in where the second finger board caught, but all look fairly fair after that, but varying the said amount.

Is this going to hurt anything? I could put them all back across the table saw and bring them down to about 0.710", then bead again. If I had 12 strips of this oddball EWC going up each side, that could be pushing 1/8", but the width differences are random.

What do you think?

[frugal]

That is going to be a problem. It's not the slight variance in width but rather the variance in the bead that you were routing at the time. If it isn't properly routed you will think that you have a tight fit in the cove of the adjacent strip but will likely have gaps once you sand the hull and discover they were not so tight after all.

You don't need to put them through the table saw but you will need to reset the finger boards on the router. You should be able to adjust the fence on the infeed side of the router to take away more material.