Official Luthiers Forum!

Hey Mike I have an idea - how about you be the first one on the OLF to buy a Jointmaker Pro? I mean, it's $1,200, but I'm sure you'll find other uses for it in building guitars (and we'd like to know what they are, so we can live vicariously through your experiences). As for the twelve hundo, rest assured the kerf savings on the $200 Taj Mah Purfling will only be the first of many savings!

Filippo

(p.s. Let us know what you actually plan to do ...)

Best economy would be a waterjet, but I'm going to bet that's not on your list of options under consideration. The waterjet could come out at a clean cut with a 0.02-0.03 kerf. You could get close to that, 0.03-0.04" clean, on a CNC mill with a properly set up slitting saw blade. Laser probably isn't suitable; it might be able to blow through but you'd have some crispy burnt edges.

The 'thin kerf' tablesaw blades are huge by comparison to bandsaw blades. I might have missed something, but the thinnest blade I saw from Freud was still in the 80-thou range which is more than one strip turned to sawdust for each you yield. I know you can get a fine finish at just a bit over 0.04" with Laguna's high end bandsaw blades, and I assume you can match that with something Lenox makes. If you use a power feed, you can get a truly smooth finish from a bandsaw with half the losses of a table saw. The bandsaw is harder to set up optimally, but a 1" cut isn't demanding.