I was surprised to find that, as I started, I couldn’t even view the website because the hosting company had updated some software without updating all the requisites so the site didn’t even work!  Sigh…

In any case, if you’ve been one of the ones who have been checking in, I apologize for letting this languish and will try to do better in the future!!!

The good/bad part of this style is that most of the woodwork is curved, with very few straight lines.  I concluded that, to keep the proper flow and sweeps AND still have all the interlocking joinery line up, the framework, at least, needed to be cut on a CNC Router.  Cool, I’ve got one of those

To make a VERY LONG story shorter, I did some trial cuts of some of the longest parts in January of 2019.  From these experiments, I realized that the CNC router needed to be larger to reliably make the parts.  Consequently the project languished until I finally upgraded my CNC Router to a larger, more solid, one this year.  This spring I made the base, then made the top, and left the pieces to cure over the Summer while we were in Maine.  When we returned, and got some time, once Kate & Paul’s Wedding reception was completed, I did the final finishing, assembly, and installed it in our Living Room.  I’m quite pleased with the result:

Completed Coffee Table installed in Living Room.

Coffee Table right view, ready in shop.

Coffee Table, Left view, ready in shop.

Coffee Table base, all assembled, ready for finishing.

Here is the replica, mounted on our Garden Shed:

New decoration for our garden shed.

And a closer view:

Here’s a closer view of the branch and ButterFly

And finally the Butterfly:

Closeup of Butterfly

Details of how this was made are down below.

The other recent addition to the Yard is some livestock to entertain our Granddaughter when she comes to visit.

Here is the Sheep looking longingly at the front lawn…

Closeup of the Sheep:

Sheep painted.

The two large pieces, the Sheep and, especially, the Stylized Branch, both required some special cutting techniques because both of them were too large to fit on the CNC Plasma Table.  The table can only cut  23″ in one direction and 25″ in the other.  The good news is that the table is open on the ends of the 23″ axis so, theoretically ^{(see Note [1] below)}, I could cut something as long as will fit in my Workshop.

However, this required multiple steps in both processing the artwork and the cutting process. Each step allowed me to cut a region of the metal, the cutting was paused while I re-positioned and aligned the steel for the next cut, and then cutting was resumed at the next section with the software offsetting the coordinates to match the new position.  The alignment is critical as the cut line is only about 0.050″ wide so any error in positioning would, at best, leave a jog in the cut line, or, worse, an uncut section of steel that would need manual cutting and fixing.

The sheep was used to test and prove the process.  It could have been done by limiting the size to 23″, but using a full sheet gave me a bigger sheep and tested the process.

The first step was to rework the art work:

Maximized Sheep Artwork, rotated and scaled to fit 24×24 piece of steel.

You can see the split line between the two halves of the drawing.  That’s where the art work needed to be separated into to independent groups.  Note that the art work has internal cuts and they had to be separated into the two different cut phases as well.

Using the Sheep project to refine the process turned out to be a wise decision as I learned enough from the Sheep project to do the Stylized branch, which required three sections over a 72 piece of steel, and 4 joints.

Branch Artwork showing three sections and mounting hole locations.

Cutting a 6 foot long piece of steel also required some re-arrangement of my workshop, not only to make room for the workpiece but also to provide support for the portions of steel that were on either side of the table during the cut.   It also concerned me that my Plasma cutter, which is normally kept in a little alcove surrounded by fiberglass welding blankets where most of the sparks are contained by the blankets, would now be out in the open during all the cuts with sparks flying in all directions!  As a precaution I put my fire extinguisher right at my side during the whole operation!

Here is the setup prior to cut:

I had to rearrange my workshop to manage a 6 foot long piece of steel!

And here is the result after the cut:

And here is the finished cut. Notice the lead in and lead out cuts at the joint of each section.

And the final piece cleaned up and ready to paint.

Branch ready for painting!

All in all, the cutting went very well with probably no more than 1/32″ misalignment in the worst case.  As a result of this project, I’m confident that I can reliably do larger pieces still!

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Kerry decided to look for an inexpensive cabinet from Overstock etc. so we could fill the space quickly.  She found a number of candidates, but all of them were too large or wrong shape for the space we had.  Rather than having an off-the-shelf cabinet look clumsy in the space, we agreed that I would make a knock off of the off-the-shelf unit, but re-sized to fit the space.

Here is the original cabinet:

Original cabinet idea.

The first change I wanted to make was to replace the glass with something opaque since we didn’t want to keep the cookbooks in a nice neat order required if they were visible.  In this case, solid panel doors would have worked but I thought it might be ‘interesting’ to use the four side by side panels to ‘tell a story’.  At first I thought of panels engraved with Kanji symbols, something I could easily do on the CNC router.   You know, something like Life, Health, Happiness…

However, Kerry thought something that was more a ‘picture’ would be better and, after spending a few days researching, came up with a nice stylized ‘branch’ that could flow from one panel to the next.  I liked it!

Here is the result of the paneled doors:

Doors with engraved and painted panels.

Finally, as you can see from the doors above, I decided that, rather than have some nondescript ‘brown wood’, I used quarter sawn white oak, stained with a dark tung oil.  Here is the finished cabinet (still waiting to harden enough to wax).

Finished cabinet, ready to be loaded with cookbooks!

The good news is that, despite the low temperatures, the Workshop Heat Pumps have kept my digs roasty toasty!  Not bad for my first Heat Pump installation!

A bandsaw has a long single loop blade (on my saws the lengths range from 71″ to 140″) which is suspended between two wheels – the driving wheel and the idler wheel.  These wheels have rubber (or urethane) covers to cushion and provide a friction surface for the blade.   Unfortunately, if you leave a blade under tension, the rubber gets flattened on one half of it’s circumference – the side under tension and the blade tends to stretch.  Conversely, if you leave the blade untensioned and forget to tension it prior to turning on the saw, you will receive a nasty surprise.  If you’re lucky, the only thing that will happen is that the blade will jump off the wheels and only ruin the blade.  If you’re unlucky then YOU might get ‘ruined’ along with the blade.

There is one other aspect of bandsaw safety that most other high power woodworking tools have already addressed – the switches used to turn on bandsaws are simply On/Off switches – you turn it on, it stays on until you manually turn it off.  Other high power equipment has a ‘magnetic’ switch, which will turn on ONLY if there is power and, if power is lost, then the magnetic switch automatically turns off.

Why does this matter?  If you live in an area that occasionally loses power (the House in the Woods, for a random example – thanks ‘Progress’ Energy) then you will find that it is very disconcerting to come back to your shop only to find a piece of equipment was accidentally left on during the last power outage.  Again, if you’re lucky then you’ve only wasted some power and a bit of wear and tear on your equipment.  I won’t speculate on the ‘unlucky’ scenario.

So, given this introduction, I’ve upgraded my two bandsaws with Safety switches.  What do they do, you ask?

First, they are magnetic switches which WILL automatically turn off if we lose power. – Check!

Second, they have an interlock that will prevent the saw from turning on if the Blade is untensioned!  Cool, Double Check!

Thirdly, they will light a very noticeable light when the blade is tensioned.  This reminds me to untension the blade when I’m shutting down at the end of a session.  Excellent! Triple Check!

Here are a couple of views on one bandsaw’s upgrade…