Well I didn’t knock out 10 but I beat my previous 2 record with 3 panels in one day, so top that Javery
Been progressing along with cutting rectangles. Am I the only one that thought this would be the stupid easy part only to find that both drawing and cutting exact all around 90 degree’s rectangles is actually pretty tough? I tried a T-square which seemed great at first until I realized that relies on the edge of the wood being straight. Then I tried drawing with a right angle, but just getting a little bit off on the angle over a long enough line can really screw that up. In the end I mostly used the measuring tape, with the right angle to get direction of the lines and then straight edge to connect measured points.
I found it comical at times all the ways that I had to sometimes set things up just to get a stable cut:
I was getting tired of using my jig and router technique (slow) so I tried the table saw above. This thing has turned out to be pretty worthless. The fence on it only extends 12” and you can see there isn’t a lot to stabilize the pieces when feeding it in. In addition here was the result I got with the cut:
Look at all of that lovely chipping
. I’m sure there is a way to get it better (I’ve read making two cuts, one pass halfway through the material then run it through again after rasing the blade), but in general this thing stinks. I guess there is a reason it costs $125. If I were to do it over again I would skip the cheap table saws.
It ended up being a blessing though as I hadn’t noticed that the 4’x8’ had warped on me:
Bperkins asked if it might have made contact with some water on one side, and then I remembered that when I moved it I temporarily set in on the grass when opening the side gate, so yeah don’t let your wood touch the grass.
Managed to salvage some parts on the end but lost a lot of material
:
These saw horses have been helpful with the groves cut out:
Allowed the jigsaw to pass through and support the piece on the side, and used the wood to keep a piece from sliding (actually fits two pieces of ¾” material perfectly, figured that out after taking the pic.)
Anyway it was back to jigsaw and router, but I wanted to try and speed things up so I tried double stick taping the straight edge to the bottom of a piece cause I got tired of moving clamps to make the cuts (as I showed in the previous posts).
Was going well:
Cut went much faster and was fairly simple to setup until:
When I pulled apart the tape from the straight edge it lifted the maple veneer. Oh well glue and clamps overnight:
So I went back to my previous method although I think if you paid attention to the direction of the grain and peeled apart from the center of the piece towards the edge rather than the opposite, you probably wouldn’t have this problem
Managed to cut out several pieces (back door, marquee top and bottom, speaker panel, and interior braces):
One thing I was super paranoid about was having all of the interior horizontal pieces be all the same width. Knowing that even being off by 1/16” can affect the rigidity I came up with a good method with the tools I’m using. I thought ahead and cut the largest pieces that I’ll be using (length wise) that have the same horizontal width. In this case it was the back door and bottom panel. After cutting those I then lined up any pieces that needed that width and simply used the router and flush trim bit to get an exact width:
Above pic is lining up the top wood and clamping it down onto the bottom panel and then flush cut it with the router to make the width be identical.
I’m sure that’s enough for now. Any guess as to what this is for?
Damn I'm sore, nobody ever talks about that.