Greg, (and anybody else interested)
I am a member of a number of different fishing tackle making forums, and your post the other day reminded me of a trick one member in Malaysia came up with due to the difficulty of ordering various tools. He roughs out blanks for crankbaits, and then hand carves them to finish before adding bills, hardware, and paint. It's a pretty common skills set practiced by the hard bait members of the forums. Many of them use a small bench top band saw for roughing out their basic shapes. A few use a scroll saws. Neither was readily available where he was located so he came up with a different solution. He mounted a jigsaw upside down to a small table with the blade sticking up through a hole. Much like the cheesy table saw adaptations we see using a circular saw. I don't know how safe it is, but he claimed it worked really well for roughing out his wood blanks, and was much easier than using a jig saw in a conventional manner to cut a blank out of a board.
I hope I didn't just cost somebody a finger for passing this on.
John Smith LOL