Well, it is back to the silver chest project, but this isn't Jessica. It is Andrea who
will help me complete the chest. Jessica's busy schedule made it impossible to get
together.
So Andrea it is, and I am lucky to have her help. She has stacked the boards
that were re-sawn by Jessica.
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Her
first task was to run each of the boards through the thickness planer. The resawn boards
were very smooth for resawing. She really is "dimensioning" the boards. She has
four that will be the sides, and she wants these to be 1/2". The top boards will be
3/4" — thicker so that we can round over the top slightly and then there are two
other boards that are 3/8" that we will use the drawer. While these are the finished
dimensions she wants, she left each a little proud so that she can finish sand to 180 grit
after the panels are made.
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I am not sure I made a good decision to just pull the planer out and run the boards
without the dust collector. I have two. One is permanently attached to the router table
and the larger one is "land locked" on the other side of the shop. We had very
little to remove, but it sure mounts up as dust.
Maybe this is sharing too much with you.
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Back at
the worktable, Andrea double checks her inventory of boards.
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If you
have followed this project from the beginning, you will recall that one of the things we
want to do is to have the boards' end grain match the mating panel on all four corners.
Here Andrea has carefully matched the boards. There are four: two for front
and right side and the other two for back and other side.
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A
close-up of these boards show that they have pretty good widths but that they need
jointing before Andrea can glue them as panels.
Her mark will allow her to joint the individual boards and get them back in
the right order for glue up.
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You know
by now that we at WoodShopDemos use the router table quite a bit. For edge jointing, we
prefer this to the long bed jointer that I have.
Andrea has installed a CMT 2" long 1/2" flush trim bit in the
router. It is the workhorse for edge jointing.
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We
are using the CMT router table which has a specially shaped fence that allows Andrea to
add two spacers behind the outfeed fence. There are two groove sets. The other set allows
for a greater removal of material. We like the shallow set that yields about a 1/16"
on each pass. She has also moved both the infeed and outfeed fences close to the bit.
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She pulls the fence forward and positions it so that the outfeed fence (with the spacers)
is aligned with the pattern bearing of the straight bit. She can see that on the far right
of the square, the infeed is back about 1/16". That is exactly what we want for edge
jointing.
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She
joints each board by making as many passes as is necessary. The "trick" is to
listen to the cutting action. Even with the hearing protectors, she can hear the bit
remove wood. When it removes wood along the entire length, the board is edge jointed.
To compensate for any slight "tilt" to the router, she runs the
boards so that one edge is run with the face down and the other edge with the face up.
This way if there is any "tilt", the opposing edges will mate perfectly.
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