Music Stand part 1

My newest project is something different for me, I'm making a music stand for a present. It involves bending wood to quite an acute degree, tighter than I've ever done before. After consulting with my friends in The Woodwhisperer chatroom I decided to stick with a technique I'm familiar with, bent lamination. The first thing that i had to do was to create a bending form, I cut a piece of 1/2 inch MDF to 24x12 inches, I used my beam compass and drew a 12 inch radius arc in one end. I rough cut it on the bandsaw and cleaned up the cut using my disc sander and finished it with a flexible sanding strip made from a strip of 1/8th inch thick Baltic birch plywood with a block of wood glued to each end for handles and 80 grit sandpaper glued to it with spray on adhesive. Once the template was true, I marked out three more blanks and rough cut them on the band saw. I glued each blank onto the template using small brads to lock them flush. I clamped the sandwich together and let it sit for a few hours.

After lunch I removed the clamps and used a flush trim bit on the router table to flush up the arc. I then marked a line 1 1/2 inch

along the top and drilled 1 inch holes every few inches to make clamping easier. I applied packing tape to the top to keep any glue from sticking to the form.

The legs of the stand are made from Curly Maple, I ripped 2 pieces 2 inches wide by 50 inches long and using the band saw I resawed it into 3, 5/16th inch thick pieces. To clean up the saw marks I ran each piece through the drum sander to a final thickness of 1/4 inch.

Next comes the hard part, gluing and clamping the laminates to the form. The open time on the glue is limited and there are many clamps that have to be tightened. After covering each layer in glue with a roller I taped them together to keep the laminates from slipping. Starting at the center of the arc I clamped the laminate sandwich to the form tight as possible. I alternated each side of the center to even out the pressure working the clamps as tight as you can and moving to the next, you won't always be able to tighten the clamp completely until you get some leverage from the next clamp in line. To get the last clap in place I had to resort to a long clamp to help lever it in place. You might think that you could start clamping at the top end of the arc and use the long straight end to pull the laminate to the form. You can't do this because the laminates must slip along each other to form to the contour or the arc, by starting in the center of the arc you allow the wood to move equally on each end of the laminate sandwich.

Once the glue has set overnight I removed the clamps and got only about an inch of spring back. I repeated the process of gluing and clamping for the second set of laminates. I scraped the excess glue off of one side and using a number 4 plane, block plane, and finally a low angle finishing plane flattened it. Starting with the arc sitting on the tablesaw table and held to the fence using a featherboard I ripped it down to 2, 3/4 inch thick legs. These are glued back to back to form a Y that makes up the front 2 legs. The second piece will be ripped to 1 1/2 inch wide for the back leg and glued to the front Y to form a tripod, more pictures in the next post will illustrate it better.

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." - Douglas Adams

Limbert Tables in SketchUp

I received a couple of emails and comments on scaling the images to create templates for the two Limbert tables I recently posted as SketchUp plans. The first step is to click on each of the pictures to get the larger view, save these to your computer and print them as large as you can. You will notice that the drawing is on a grid, this grid is 1x1 inch. Take a piece of poster board and draw a 1x1 inch grid on it, you can buy poster board with a ghost grid 1/2 x 1/2 inch printed already. Next scale the drawing by transferring the corner points and some guide points for the curve onto the poster board. Connect the dots and you have an outline of the side of the table you want to create as a template. Cut it out and trace it onto a piece of plywood or MDF, cut the template out on a bandsaw and clean up the lines and you have a perfect template to use to create the sides of either or both tables. I hope that this helps.

"The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows." ~Buddha

Islands coffee table, Part 2

This weekend saw a marathon session of MDF pattern routing to finish the Islands Table. I had started with the islands to work on the process, I have to say that I am very pleased with the way they turned out. I started working on the main table this weekend and the process was a little bit different. The coast line extends around one side of the table but the design calls for only part of it to go all the way to the floor. What I did was to draw out the coastline on a sheet of posterboard and when I was happy with it I transferred it to a 1/2 inch sheet of MDF. After cleaning up the saw marks and fairing some of the curves I traced the pattern onto 3 pieces of 3/4 MDF. To save some weight I cut a rectangle out of the back of the pieces when I trimmed the waste away. Since the pattern is on the bottom I switched to a hand router to cut these three pieces. I then took a smaller piece of 1/2 inch MDF and traced the corner. I cut the waste on the bandsaw and temporarily attached it to the coast line and using the handheld router I cut it to match that part of the top. Now I have a pattern that will be the bottom of the leg. I traced the pattern onto 17 pieces of 3/4 inch MDF and proceeded to pattern route them on the routertable. When they were complete I needed a way to line up the top with the leg once it gets to its destination. I drilled three 1/4 inch holes about 1 inch deep into the bottom of the top ( ok that doesn't sound right but it makes sense to me) and used a couple dowel points to transfer the center marks to the leg. Then I inserted two dowels and put a dowel point into the third hole. Now when Dan gets it all he'll have to do is spread some glue on the leg and slide it onto the dowels.

The other 3 legs are square made from 3/4 inch MDF with a tenon made from 1/2 inch MDF, these are designed to slide into a mortise built up onto the top and sides. Again, just a little glue on the tenons and shoulders and slide them into the mortises.

I ripped some 3/4 inch MDF to 2 1/4 inch to match the hieght of the coast line. These were glued and pinned to the top with brad nails. I added a glue block to give extra support to the side where it met the coast here.

Here it is ladies and gentlemen, the complete Islands coffee table, I think it turned out great considering we were working from just 2 pictures. I did some experimenting with some scrap pieces and it seems that vinyl spackle spread thinly over the edges then sanded smooth will leave a very smooth base for painting.

The blue tape is just to hold the leg into the mortise while it was on its side and I was inserting the other legs and turning it right side up.

I don't know if you can see it in the pictures but I used my small edge trimmer router and a camfering bit and gave it a 1/16th inch 45 degree camfer around the top and bottom to keep the edges from being pulled up. My work is done, its up to Dan now to make sure that it gets a good finish and a nice paint job.

'A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.'

Eleanor Roosevelt

Islands coffee table

This project is quite a departure for me, as most of you know, I usually make arts and crafts reproductions, this is a very modern design and its made entirely from MDF. Dan brought me the picture to the left and asked if I could make something like it. We went into the shop and started playing around and discovered that I could but not out of solid wood.

What I decided I would have to do is to start with a posterboard pattern with inside curves no tighter than 1/2 inch. This is the limit because I wanted to use a 1/2 inch flush trim bit in my router table.

To start I make a pattern out of 1/2 inch MDF on the band saw, I used the oscillating spindle sander to clean up the sawmarks and to smooth out the curves. Once the final pattern is complete I transfer it to 3/4 inch MDF 20 times, and once more to 1/2 inch MDF, this will give me a total height of 16 inches when complete. I rough cut the outlines on the band saw staying at least 1/8th inch off the line. It seems like a lot of work but cutting each one took less than a minute.
I glued the rough cut to the pattern and held it in place with a few Brad nails.... I know I know... I feel kind of dirty...

Since I have a 2 inch long flush trim bit I was able to glue and nail 2 of the rough pieces to the pattern, this makes the whole process go twice as fast . Here you see the bearing of the flush trim bit running on the pattern while the entire thickness of the rough pieces will contact the router blades.



I repeat the process of glueing and nailing two more rough blanks to the routed piece, the pattern bit bearing now will ride on the bottom of the area that was just routed.

As you can see the stack gets rather high rather quickly, it also gets rather heavy. I considered hollowing out the center pieces to reduce the weight but decided that the weight would add stability to the tall narrow "islands".

Here they are, the two islands ready to send off to Dan. They are pretty smooth after the routing but the bearing on the bit tends to indent the edges of the MDF, he'll need to hand sand the edges, prior to priming and painting them. These were the easy parts, now comes the tabletop with its own "shoreline" that will be made using the same process. I'll be able to make the legs, top and sides partially buy building "boxes" out of MDF", this should save some weight and some time, but it still needs to be strong enough to support the "shoreline", there is still some engineering before I start that build.

"A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money."

John Ruskin