Thread: When things don't quite work out

Wayne,

I decided against the forstner bits for a couple of reasons, the biggest I have is 55mm and felt that left a bit to much wall thickness in this particular piece of stock, the next reason is I only have the baby Ryobi Drill press, the large bits tend to be a little much for it, and finally when doing the in-between drilling (ie overlapping previous holes) the overlap was a little large so was not a very smooth process especially with an underpowered drill.

Ended up hollowing out the other box on the (GMC)router table, basically after slicing the top off I clamp 4 boards on top of the table that after a little fiddling around give you a sort of template for the hollowing out, basically a larger box on top, you start at 5mm (or so) depth of cut, with either straight cutter or spiral bit and move the box around within your template, gradually increasing the bit height until the desired depth is reached, with this method I found that you do not need to be overly exact with the template boards, so long as you turn the workpiece around a run around again the opposite walls are all equal thickness, have done a little rectangle tray using this method and it has 4 mm walls, more by accident than design

The tops were sliced off using the tablesaw, a bandsaw would be ideal for this, but as you see by my efforts to make a bandsaw type box without a bandsaw I don't have one
The pieces are then clamped together and the faces sanded on a piece of mdf with sandpaper stuck to it, as long as you are using the handplane trick of either both faces in or both faces out you get pretty good matching.

The main reasons for the type of boxes and things I make are based on two main critia, I have very, very limited space, a small single car garage that not only stores the car at night along with 4 bicycles and lots of wood bits, it also has my woodworking gear, so everything has to be able to be put away at night, lemme tell you putting the tablesaw up on the bench everynight is going to kill me one day, would dearly love a bandsaw, but don't have the room for even the smallest of ones, next is a sort of personal challenge, I get given lots of offcuts and single pieces of exotic & "normal" woods so I try to make something from that piece alone, the inlayed box above was an old hardwood baton roughly 65mm x 19mm x 1.2m.

So there are probably much easier ways to do things, its just I have to make what I have work. Which brings me to the WASP Sander, greatest addition you can have to a drill press, saves room rather than trying to fit in a belt sander, along with quick changing of belts and allowing you to strop blades.
The WASP Sander is made by Piric Design

Zenwood, that catch came from either Timbercon or Lee Valley, can't remember exactly, I tend to "pad out" orders so freight is not so bad as it would be for a single item.

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