While browsing around Woodpeckers’ website, I noticed that they just came out with a new variable pressure featherboard. Normally to adjust a featherboard’s pressure, the entire unit must be moved. With these, the pressure applied by the featherboard can be quickly changed by adjusting just a single plate.
If only these had come out a month sooner, I likely would have ordered them over this pair of JessEm featherboards.
The Woodpeckers featherboards are compatible with 1/4″ track, and can be used with 3/4″ x 3/8″ miter channels with optional hardware.
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The new featherboards are priced at $33-36.
Woodpeckers Featherboards via Woodpeck
Benjamen Johnson
Wow, separating the alignment and pressure functions is brilliant! It’s like going from a two handled faucet to a single lever faucet. (makes it easier to control temperature or flow without effecting the other variable, much easier for little kids to understand)
Now I just need to figure out how to do it myself so I don’t need to spend $33 on two feather boards.
Stuart
Looking at their video preview, you can see exactly how it’s done if you freeze it at the ~28-second mark.
Without any pressure adjustment, the featherboard fingers will flex along their entire length in response to wood moving beneath them. Looking at the sliding plate, you should notice little oval supports that slide between the fingers.
I imagine that there is little play between the fingers and oval spacers of the sliding plate. What this does, or should do, is stiffen up the feathers. Assuming a uniform spring/flex factor, wood passing between the featherboard and work surface won’t be able to shift the finger tips as much. Greater resistive force at the finger tips = greater pressure.
This is all speculation, of course. But I really do think that dynamically shortening the featherboards’ fingers and changing their relative stiffness is how the variable pressure is achieved.