Woody2Shoes":3sviuuas said:
custard":3sviuuas said:
But cutting and installing 1mm cross grain stringing is a really difficult trick to pull off. ....
I'm struggling to imagine how to do this
I know a couple of makers who do this and everyone agrees it's one of those "tear your hair out" challenges.
Cross cutting on any normal circular saw doesn't work, a zero clearance insert is only "zero clearance" around the saw blade's teeth, around the saw plate there's a small gap. That gap in conjunction with the air turbulence around the blade breaks up and destroys the 1mm wide cross grain stringing as it's being cut. I know one guy who did make it work by backing up the donor piece with tape, but then successfully removing the tape is itself risky and time consuming.
The two methods that, with infinite care and patience, can be made to work are these. Start with the widest cross grain piece you can find, gluing up boards if necessary, machine it down to say 2mm thick. Then use a special blade where the teeth and saw plate are almost the same thickness, I'm not sure if these blades are for special materials of for model making but I've seen them so I know they exist. Make a zero clearance insert for this blade, a wooden auxiliary fence, and turn off the dust extraction. Through trial and error set the fence so it's yielding stringing that's a good fit in your 1mm wide groove (I'm assuming the groove is 1.0-1.5mm deep), and cut the stringing. You'll still have a fairly high failure rate, but with care it is viable.
The second method that works is to use a good quality track saw set up on an MFT style table. Instead of a fence you have a stop that gives you the required snug fit, I normally cramp this stop in place and tap it back and forth with a hammer until I'm happy with the fit. The track holds down the work piece and prevents flutter, and the saw kerf in the base board effectively acts as a zero clearance insert. Again, you'll lose a few of the cross grain stringings that you cut, but with care there'll be enough successes to make it viable.
The one factor you do have in your favour with cross grain stringing is that it's relatively simple to invisibly join shorter prices together during installation, so on long runs of cross grain work you can get there in bite sized stages. In that respect it's no different to the way cross grain edging is applied in restoration work.
