JOAT Viet Nam. Divorce. Cancer. Been there, done that, got over it. Now where the Hell are my T-shirts?
- JOAT
I made one of these for my friends' kids 4th birthday, and it was such a hit I had to make 4 more.
Never did find a really good way to batch-cut the 13 degree bevel (or whatever it turned out to be) of the edges of the slats that make up the domed lid. The first one I did on a stationary belt sander, but it was hard to keep the angle consistent and generated tons of dust. One the next 4, I rigged up a jig so I could cut them on my router table (kind of like jointing on a router table, but with a tilted platform to hold the slats.) This was much faster, but a little awkward, and the jig wasn't adjustable. (The slats are 1/4" by 3/4" by 11" long, with one lone edge beveled. Much too small to cut safely on a table saw, at least without some sort of jig or fixture to hold them securely.)
Maybe it would be easier with a good block plane. That's probably how a 17th Century ship's carpenter would have done it. :-)
Mon, Nov 12, 2007, 12:29pm (EST+5) snipped-for-privacy@post.harvard.edu (John=A0Santos) doth sayeth: Maybe it would be easier with a good block plane. That's probably how a 17th Century ship's carpenter would have done it. :-)
I haven't thought this completely thru, haven't finished my first cuppa. But seems to me, if you set your saw blade at the right angle, you could cut a small strip off a piece of wood, to get the angle, then flip the wood, cut a strip however wide, which would give the two angles needed, then flip and cut another strip the proper width, repeat until enough strips. ,There may be something wrong with doing it this way, but my mind is still not awake enough fo figure out what it is yet.
JOAT Viet Nam. Divorce. Cancer. Been there, done that, got over it. Now where the Hell are my T-shirts?
- JOAT
The original design calls for one edge of each strip to be square and the other edge to be beveled at the appropriate angle to follow the curve of the lid. I think you could split the angle in half and bevel all the edges.
The 1st slat on each side is special, because the the lid starts out with a square-cut slat finger-jointed at the ends to the not-quite- semicircular sides of the lid. (The first 3/4 inch of the sides is straight up and down, then the curved part is not tangent to the sides so the angle is different.)
And the last slat (at the top) has to be pretty much hand-fitted to the space between the last two slats coming up the sides. On mine, it was very hard to keep the spacing even, so the last slat was a crazy 3-dimensional trapezoid, and different on each chest! Well, they look fine once they're planed and sanded to a smooth round surface (on the outside.) The inside of the lid is a bunch of disjoint flat slats, so it looks "rustic", which I decided was perfectly appropriate for a Pirate Chest.
A fun project, made a bunch of little kids very happy. (I put a little luggage style padlock on each one, so they all have the illusion of privacy and security. However, it only took my niece about 5 minutes to decide the most secure place to store the key was inside the chest. Then it only took her about 10 seconds to realize why that was a bad idea! Fortunately, I had a spare key!)
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