Author: Oboe Craig
Date: 2011-01-21 23:51
John,
I use the old arrow splitter and separate guillotine from an old Graf setup I bought from Covey while in school in 1978, and now use a RGD gouger with 11 mm bed.
My Brannon-X shaper I've had since early college days in 1974. Its the only shaper I have used. No need to mess with success, eh?
The RDG gouger has a built in guillotine, too , and I just use it right before gouging to trim pre-gouged cane for that setup. Its a tad shorter than the Graf was.
A normal American style .6 mm center gouge setup was done by Raymond Duste at Forrests where I bought the gouger. I have not yet needed to have the blade sharpened, but I still have a lot of Graf-gouged cane on hand and some I re-gouge with the RDG if its thick enough. I mix it in with my reed making. So I probably have only gouged 1000 pieces on the RDG so far. Stats a little skewed because my reed a day only really restarted last May when I retired from corp work.
My cane splitting is done, not for exact radious measures, rather for pretty exact symmetry. You know, follow the rounded triangle of the cane and find symmetrical arcs for the splitting points.
For 10.0 - 10.5 mm cane, I go for the larger diameter portion of the arc, and for 10.5 - 11 mm cane I go for the more pronounced arcs which = narrower diameter results. It levels things out.
Overall, this mitigates the differences in cane and gives me better consistency overall and results in more comfortable reeds.
I know some who try to inspect the tube and use a razor blade to find the one best piece in a tube, but have never really liked that approach. It triples the cost of cane and my results are pretty good my way, such that I get about 1/3 useful reeds overall, and that is with a pretty high quality bar set over the years.
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