orepass

When last we visited the seat construction was going well and i was going to finish the blog with a quick view into cutting the seat to final dimensions. That did not go as planned so I got to make one more seat blank and repeat!

Here’s what happened and several lessons that followed. The blanks needed to be smoothed and I did this using a belt sander for their concave curves and I hand plane and sander for the convex curves. Yeah I know the hand tools keep sneaking into the process. No pictures of the smoothing but I think you can imagine it. Once the curve was smooth the seat blank (curved needed to be trimmed to size and shaped. You can see the template in the picture below.

I mounted the template onto the first three blanks and trimmed it on the bandsaw and used the router table to bring out to final shape. Blank number three…Don’t tell anyone but I screwed the template on in the wrong direction! The bandsaw was very efficient as it cut off the wrong end and I had a seat without enough depth…firewood! I took the other blanks and all went well until the last one where the router ate part of the blank. Puzzled I learned that the router bit was too low since the mounting bolt had loosened. Two mistakes and I leave the shop. No sense i risking injuries when I am frustrated with myself.

Later I returned to the lumber yard picked up a new board and made two more seat blanks. This also brought about a new lesson, I could not cut the curve smoothly on the blank. After several minutes I remembered changing to the wider bandsaw blade and realized that it was preventing the blade to match the desired curve. As I mention I am relatively new to the bandsaw and curved jigs. A narrower blade and everything worked well.