Taper Cut On Rudder Faces

I took plenty of pictures to support a detailed post. The faces of the rudders are made of 4mm Okume. Where the faces close at the trailing edge, a tapered cut has to be made so there can be some contact surface between the faces for a solidly glued joint.  I have a hand planer. In order to get an angled cut from the planer, I build a jig. The first thing was to make small 8 degree wedges, I did this on the miter saw. I clamped on a stop for the stock to insure that all the wedges came out at the same thickness.

Next I brad nailed the wedges to a piece of 1x2 strip. I used the polymer brads so I could go through these later with screws and not worry about getting tangled up in metal brads.

Next I screwed this strip with the wedges into the side of a 2x4. Basically giving my planer guide something to slide against that is set up at the right angle.

Here is a profile view. Some the wedges protruded a a bit so I sanded that off.

I set up the rudder face blank as shown. Couple of notes, I cut the blanks extra wide that way if anything untoward happened I could have another try. Also learned that everything needs to be thoroughly clamped in place. I tried to get away with omitting some clamps and things started moving.

Here is the profile view

I took three passes at 1/32 depth setting to get it right. Technically it should have taken 4 passes not sure why but three seemed to do the trick.

Here is the profile

I set these up on edge just to show how they came together.

This was my first time using a power planer and I could really tell the difference in the quality of my cuts as I got used to (and learned to trust) the tool.  It's a fun tool to use, its powerful but not hard to control. The hardest part was keeping the power cord from hanging up on stuff. I gave up on connecting the vacuum hose since it got in the way too much. I still need to cut these down to proper width and mill my piece of alaskan yellow cedar into spars for the spine of the rudders. Then it will be time to start putting things together on the jig.