Monday, April 14, 2008

Ripping laminations for the stem

This video shows us goofing around a lot, trying to get ready to rip our big white oak board into 2" x 1/8" strips. It took us awhile to set up, because the board wasn't two inches high. We solved that problem by making the cuts at an angle thus increasing their measurement to 2"+.

However, when we started ripping with the table saw, we realized that a lateral bow in oak meant that we couldn't line the board up accurately on the table saw. Starting at 0:08 or so, we begin planing the board offscreen.

After we rip the board into something like 20 strips (lams), we have to set up the jig that we will be bending them on. This requires cleaning off the table, marking out the structure of the curve from the plans, and then using a batten to draw a fair curve. As you can see, this takes me a long, long time. Drew has to help.

Then we aligned blocks along the curve, using a unnecessarily labor intensive drilling and screwing procedure that looks like some sort of complicated dance. This is my favorite part in all the movies. Its also a little embarrassing.

After setting up the blocks, we quickly and with almost no fanfare clamp the lams to the jig. Thats what all this work was leading up to.

1 comment:

chad said...

yeah, that was a good one. I am impressed that you guys are doing such a good job with the documentation-- time lapse, even. It's looking good.