Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Bags and Bags of Shavings


The author of the article that I am following to build the bunk bed mentions that you'll have to do a lot of work with the planer for this project and after last nights work I can see what he meant.

First I had to glue up the leg caps which just about drained what is left of my 4L jug of glue. Since I've had that jug for 5 or 6 years I guess I can't complain. I stacked the legs one atop another to distribute the clamping pressure and used all my Bessey + one old pipe clamp to hold them together. Similarily to when I laminated the legs up I could have used a few more clamps - when will Lee Valley have another sale???

Once the glue was dry I used the table saw to cut the oversized leg caps a little closer to the size of the legs, so that there was about 1/8" leftover. Then I used the router and a flush trim bit to trim the caps flush.

I should mention before I glued up the leg caps that I ran all the legs through the jointer to clean up two faces, than through the table saw to cut them close to width, than finally the planer to get the width correct before adding the caps. Running the 7' leg through the jointer was challenging in my small shop area.

The last step was to plane all of the legs down to 3 5/8". This is what generated another two garbage cans full of shavings and clogged up the dang dryer hose I use to connect the planer to the dust collection pipe. I eventually gave up clearing the hose and just pulled the dust collection bit off the planer and let the shavings fly. I ended up with quite a pile of shavings, but all four legs are squared up and ready to go.


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