It's been a few days since posting but things are moving along well. I made the wooden prototype. and found a few problems that needed addressing. After building the knife holding block I found that I needed everything to be adjustable. I needed to be able to tweak the knife this way and that. So I split the arm and added two blocks face to face to hold the arm, but the one block will have over sized holes (by 1/16") that will allow for tweaks.

The next problem was with the knife, I can put in slots to mount the knife forward and back, but I needed to add a stop to adjust the height of the knife. So in the block I added an allen head bolt that will sit between the legs and hold the knife up.

Here is a sketchup pic of the modified design.

I was able to build this and put the arbor in place and adjust everything. Worked beautifully. So I brought everything to the machine shop at work and will start the actual metal work this week.

I'll try to get a video or a few pics of the wooden proto up this week, as well as a few in process pics.