Today’s piece of the puzzle was making the little curved top bolection mouldings for the doors. To be honest, I have never needed to do this before, I’ve never been asked, but like so many things, when people specifically want something, I have trouble saying no.
How hard can it be? If a man in a workshop lit by gas with machinery powered by a waterwheel could do it 150 years ago, then so can I, with all the convenience that 230v offers, and a shit load of power tools.
This is my justification process.
Just a matter of figuring it out.
Back to the drawing program. Adobe Illustrator, I love it. Draw a path, work out the offsets, print it out, glue it down onto a piece of mdf, et voila! Instant, accurate templates. Well, of course you have to cut them out and do, but you get the picture.
I’d originally planned to do bent laminates for these mouldings, but after testing some thinly prepared stock, I figured I would have to take the material down to 0.9mm to get around the tightest curves and that would mean laminating 14 pieces together to get the half inch.
When you are handling that much of a glue up it has the potential to go wrong very easily. I also wanted to get away from glue lines, so scrap the bent laminate, join pieces together instead.
I had the shape and sizes worked out and found the spot to mitre the tight curves. Three pieces make up the top piece of moulding, I started out by splining them together, seeing as I am still without a saw, (roll your eyes, yes, I am still going on about that), I did them with the router.
I had a convex and a concave temple made for the outer and inner curves. To ensure they both registered with the workpiece, I placed them in position on top of each other (overlapping) and bored screw holes for attaching the workpiece. One set of screw holes in the underside of the workpiece fits both templates, clever, huh. I opted for two templates instead of one as I thought it was that small, it would be good to have have something to get a grip on.
Then it was just a case of roughing out on the bandsaw, bearing guided router profiler, then using a 1/4 bearing guided round over bit to get the profile.
the splines are quite discreet
Yes the photo shows it all burnt up, nothing a bit of sanding can’t fix,
and finally, to test the how strong the moulding was, i suspended my 4” belt sander from it. Didn’t break surprisingly.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ljimg/mlqdk1z.jpg
Crafty Puzzles
No comments:
Post a Comment