Making the body PART 15
Hi all, it’s time to do the binding!
So I knew that I couldn’t use a router in the traditional way because that would assume that the angle between the top / back and the sides is exactly 90ยบ, and it’s not – see picture below.
So the I decided to turn my router upside down and build a stupid contraption to do the cutting for me. And of course stupid me didn’t think about how this contraption would cut the inside of the curves (duh).
So after a bit of modification I came up with this:
In case you’re wondering those circles are from when I was testing out my circle jig that I got from Lee Valley. Now, you’d think that this jig would have worked allright but after running through a few test pieces I decided that it was WAY too powerful a tool to use for my first time doing this (the practice piece got chewed up pretty quick, and not in a good way). So what I ended up doing was buying this nifty little tool from Stewart Macdonald:
Although it is a specialized tool that was specifically built for this purpose, I felt it could have been designed a bit better. You see the tiny little roller bearing? You have to hold on to that while your rotary tool spins a highly sharpened blade at 20,000 RPM about 1/8″ away from your fingers – just a little disheartening. Regardless, I still have my fingers and it worked out OK for the most part. I planned on a two step design so I wasn’t making it very easy on myself for my first time doing this!
Next time we’ll do the end cap wedge detail or whatever you call it, even though we should have done that post before this one LOL
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


September 9th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
How it would work inside of the curves?
September 10th, 2008 at 11:16 am
It works surprisingly well inside the curves. With this tool, it will cut the binding channel regardless of how tight the curve is. I highly recommend this tool, although I feel it could have been designed better (see the note I made above).