Steve Maskery
Established Member
I had a birthday. Well, it happens.
A little while before that, I went with a friend to an exhibition of works by French artist Olivier Leger. Well, he sounds French, but he's actually from Loughborough. At first sight they looked like ordinary pen and ink drawings, but each picture had a magnifying glass hanging next to it, so that we could look more closely. Every picture was made up of thousands of very tiny images of other objects – mushrooms, trees, galloping horses, planets – you name it, there's one in there somewhere. They were wonderful. So you can imagine my delight when I was given a giclée print as a birthday present. It was unframed and, fortunately, not as large as the original, but at 770 x 560mm it is not a small picture, so such a special picture calls for a special frame.
I've been given something else recently, too. All my next-door-neighbour's mahogany window frames. Some of the wood is rotten, there are lots of holes in it and it's all weathered, so doesn't look very pretty at first sight, but it cleans up surprisingly well, and providing that I'm canny about the way I use it, I can get sizes out of it to get just what I want.
The moulding is a fabrication of five strips of wood, two plain rectangular section and three staff bead section, made using a roundover bit on the router table. When I made up a sample, I discovered that it was quite tricky to keep all five pieces aligned during glue-up, so I decided that an alignment spline down the length would be a good idea.
Using my featherboard fence on my tablesaw, I cut a shallow groove down the strips. The two outside staff beads are grooved on one face only, the other 3 pieces are milled on both faces. The featherboard fence keeps them tight down on the table and in to the fence at the same time.
The grooves are not quite 4mm deep, so the keys need to be a little over 7mm wide and 2.8mm thick. I wouldn't normally rip anything as narrow as 2.8mm, but with a zero-clearance insert and featherboard it wasn't as hairy as it would have been without.
I didn't rip the strips to 7mm on the tablesaw, however, they were just too thin for that, but it was fine on the bandsaw.
The four sides were glued up, separately, using as many clamps as I could get on.
One of them turned out to be a little cupped, but I had plenty of thickness so I simply put them all through the thicknesser.
At this point I did something stupid. I set up my dado stack to cut a rebate and then forgot to use it. Instead I gave all the pieces a coat of primer. It was no big deal, but it did mean that I had to leave my saw set up in dado mode until I could handle the workpieces again.
If you don't have a dado stack, you can do exactly the same job with a router (it will be just as quick, if you include the setup time), but the dado does give a beautifully clean cut with no tearout.
A little while before that, I went with a friend to an exhibition of works by French artist Olivier Leger. Well, he sounds French, but he's actually from Loughborough. At first sight they looked like ordinary pen and ink drawings, but each picture had a magnifying glass hanging next to it, so that we could look more closely. Every picture was made up of thousands of very tiny images of other objects – mushrooms, trees, galloping horses, planets – you name it, there's one in there somewhere. They were wonderful. So you can imagine my delight when I was given a giclée print as a birthday present. It was unframed and, fortunately, not as large as the original, but at 770 x 560mm it is not a small picture, so such a special picture calls for a special frame.
I've been given something else recently, too. All my next-door-neighbour's mahogany window frames. Some of the wood is rotten, there are lots of holes in it and it's all weathered, so doesn't look very pretty at first sight, but it cleans up surprisingly well, and providing that I'm canny about the way I use it, I can get sizes out of it to get just what I want.
The moulding is a fabrication of five strips of wood, two plain rectangular section and three staff bead section, made using a roundover bit on the router table. When I made up a sample, I discovered that it was quite tricky to keep all five pieces aligned during glue-up, so I decided that an alignment spline down the length would be a good idea.
Using my featherboard fence on my tablesaw, I cut a shallow groove down the strips. The two outside staff beads are grooved on one face only, the other 3 pieces are milled on both faces. The featherboard fence keeps them tight down on the table and in to the fence at the same time.
The grooves are not quite 4mm deep, so the keys need to be a little over 7mm wide and 2.8mm thick. I wouldn't normally rip anything as narrow as 2.8mm, but with a zero-clearance insert and featherboard it wasn't as hairy as it would have been without.
I didn't rip the strips to 7mm on the tablesaw, however, they were just too thin for that, but it was fine on the bandsaw.
The four sides were glued up, separately, using as many clamps as I could get on.
One of them turned out to be a little cupped, but I had plenty of thickness so I simply put them all through the thicknesser.
At this point I did something stupid. I set up my dado stack to cut a rebate and then forgot to use it. Instead I gave all the pieces a coat of primer. It was no big deal, but it did mean that I had to leave my saw set up in dado mode until I could handle the workpieces again.
If you don't have a dado stack, you can do exactly the same job with a router (it will be just as quick, if you include the setup time), but the dado does give a beautifully clean cut with no tearout.
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