Hi Joe!

I use a Freud 8 1/4" blade in my unisaw with a pair of blade stabilizers from Lee Valley. When not pushing wood through the machine, it's absolutely silent. They're under $20 and have a thinner kerf than the Forrest blades. But I do find it easier to thickness plane my strips before I rout the B&Cs. I have a stop set on my planer so that whenever I mill strips they're always identical. Makes milling them easier. I understand your point about sanding, but it takes about 25-30 minutes to thickness plane enough stock for an entire boat.

At one shop where I worked we did a lot of laminate work with melamine-covered chip board and MDF, and the plastic laminate itself. We also used the dust collector when we swept the floor, so it picked up lots of crap and we dumped in a dumpster. Another place I worked we used mostly wood, and a local horse farm brought their trailer with a tarp setup and everything and the dust collector (a huge commercial "tornado" unit) dumped right into their trailer.

Now that I have my own shop I use cedar and mahogany in the garden as mulch. Other woods I compost. But- this summer's big experiment- my wife read Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and got all hyped up about growing our own food. So we have a place that gets no sunlight, and she found a retailer that sells mushroom spawn, and we're trying to cultivate mushrooms in the sawdust. Don't know how it will work, but it's a pretty low-maintenance crop.

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