So you’ve cut out a rabbet, and you want to cleanup the “bottom” …. If you used a circular marking gauge, the round cutter serves as a knife to mark the line – but it can also serve as a light blade. By resting the fence of the gauge on the reference face, you can clean up the bottom of the joint by using sliding the cutter head around holding the fence firmly on the face. You won’t use this to remove a lot of waste, rather you can remove most of the waste with a chisel and just clean up the last hairs breadth with the gauge. We used this technique in a session of making the winding sticks at my last Woodcraft class . Not everyone has the rabbet planes, or the router planes (yet!), but almost everyone is using circular marking gauges, so this helped out.

And bonus, to glue in the strips, we used epoxy mixed with black dye to obfuscate any edges that weren’t as pretty as we liked. The end results are pretty good, if I do say so myself!

photos courtesy of Joe Ireland