Last couple of weekends I’ve been out of town, so I’ve been shifting to trying to get things done during the week. Bperkins said it best on a couple of other posts….. just getting in the garage and pulling off one thing per night is the way to go, even if it’s only 10 min.
The little progress starts to feel bigger once you can put things together. I managed to get the rest of my blocking down on the base:
AND…..because of that I was able to finally test the bend on my coin door:
When I clamped that and stood up to see it holding in place without any cracking I was like:
Before I had put the door on I knew I needed to finally do some slot cutting. I have been dreading this for a long time, as I had issues with drifting when I cut my little control panel box. On the small box I had used the router table and moved the piece. The table doesn’t have a perfectly level surface because it has an insert that is adjustable that I have never been able to level.
Initially I tried the Whiteside 3 wing Arbour that I bought from t-molding.com in my Ryobi, but noticed that the package mentioned the maximum RPM of 16,000, my Ryobi is fixed speed at 24,000, and it felt SCARY. Decided it would be better to use the new Makita as it has variable speed settings. Only problem was the standard base it comes with makes it easy to tilt and not stay level with a big bit like that. So I had the idea to use the same circle jig I bought and it worked great:
This allowed me to confidentially bring the router to the edge with no vertical movement.
To get the correct depth, I used my digital calipers to measure the thickness of the wood (side note this piece actually varied from 18.4mm on one end to 17.7mm on the other). For this piece I had to take an average. But I would take the thickness, subtract the bit size (1/16” in this case), and then divide by 2. I’ve noticed that for Plywood the thickness of each piece can vary and it’s important to measure and adjust your depth if necessary. Also quick side note I learned the hard way that t-molding can have different spline width’s, and the slot cutter you need to buy is NOT the width of the spline, it’s usually 1/32” less (website you order from usually tells you, I bought form t-molding.com).
Anyway, taking pictures just to confirm before cutting helps:
Always good to see it line up visually. And after it’s cut:
Lastly had to slap the sides on for a little motivation just to see how it looks:
More to come……..