Cutting Boards - Part 9

I made the first handles by an ad-hoc method so it took relatively a lot of time. But since I intend to make a lot of boards this time, I decided to make jigs and make sixty handles in one batch.

I have enough of these offcuts that sixty pieces did not even make a dent in the pile.

I began by cutting both ends at 60° on the table saw. For that, a simple jig from a board offcut sufficed.

To drill the holes into the ends I cut four pieces of a spruce plank at 60° and I glued them together on a board in such a way that allowed me to simply insert the prefabricate into the jig. I fixed the jig under the drill press and set a fixed drill depth. After that, I could easily drill all sixty pieces on both ends at the same place and to the same depth.

After all pieces were drilled I needed to rough-cut the handle outline out of each piece. For the first batch, I drawn the outline on each piece and I cut it approximately on the bandsaw. For sixty pieces it was again worth making a dedicated jig.

I fixed a piece of particle board to the band saw with two 10 mm holes at different distances from the blade. I also made a rotating arm out of spruce in which the handle prefabricate could be fixed and which two had two holes. I used the bigger radius to cut the inside of the handles and the smaller to cut the outside. The jig worked very well, but it does have a somewhat "impromptu" look to it. At least for the base fixed to the band saw I will make something better and more permanent, with holes for cutting radii of different diameters.

Jigs do save a lot of time so making sixty half-moon prefabricates did not take that long. After that, I ground them to final form and glued them into boards. I will write the next week about that, this blog post is long enough.