I've got a project to repair an item for an uncle to, essentially, replace a missing panel in a barrel. As a warm up for that I decided to make a pentagon shaped structure.
The angles came out close, but it does not fit well and I'm trying to look for clues.
The test material was a strip of plywood about 30 inches long and 40 inches wide.
I set the angle of the table to be 36 deg off of center and ran both side of the strip through. I then ripped the strip into similar length pieces.
Using my digital angle gauge, the angle of the beveled edges ranges from
53.6 to 54.4 degrees. When I put pieces together, there's always one piece that does not fit.The third attempt worked better than the second, with some slight tweaking of the angles. (The first was a complete mathematical mistake.) Are there any suggestions for improving this process?
The barrel pieces will be done in mahogany when I feel confident in being able to do this work without ruining the wood. Although I'll probably move up to poplar, or something similar, as a final dry run.