IT HAS BEGUN

The holidays are over and there can be no more procrastinating. Today I began work on the xylophone. I have been a little nervous about trying to plane the thickness of the board I bought. The last time I used a thickness planer was my senior year of high school, and it was a large, stand alone, industrial planer. Luckily my dad has a Ryobi bench top thickness planer. I should not have been concerned, it was loud but did a great job. Purpleheart is very hard but the planer had no problem with it at all. I probably made about 8 passes to remove the 1/8" of thickness, turning the board over each time. It made a very pretty pile of purple wood chips, which we saved for some future art projects. The final product does not really look any different than when I started today, but it is now 5/8" of an inch thick instead of 3/4". Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to find the time to rip the 6" wide board into 4 boards that are each 1 3/16" wide, use the table router to round all the corners over a bit, and cut the first key to length.