Box joint blade set

[bobfowler]

HOLY CRAP! When you make sawdust you MAKE sawdust! That router setup looks bigger than my entire shop...

I use this to make all my box joints, dovetails, signs, cabinets and nearly anything less than 8' x 12'... router

erie


then again this is what we have for a tv in our living room. (older pic from about 1 1/5 years ago, alot finished since then.

[barryjyoung]

I cut my first box joint with an Xacto razor saw. I had a camera come into the shop for repair. It had a broken piece of wood in the rear box. I cut out the fingers of the offending piece with the razor saw then chiseled and filed the remaining fingers of the mating pieces. Then I tried to find wood for the replacement. It is hard to find wood like that on a camera made in the 40's. Finally, I found something as close as I was going to get. After planing it with my trusty #8 Stanley jointer plane to width and thickness and rough cutting the length with the razor saw, I sanded the final length and transferred the fingers with a paring knife. It was quite a challenge to make the fingers straight, square and parallel using only the razor saw, a 1/8 inch chisel bought for this project (which I did not know how to sharpen) and needle files. In the end the joint was pretty much perfect. This was the first project I ever did with hand or power tools. The only power tool I owned at the time was a drill.

[epatsellis]

HOLY CRAP! When you make sawdust you MAKE sawdust! That router setup looks bigger than my entire shop...

bob, table size is 8'x12' with room to spare, overall size is 13'x18', basically a one car garage.(though you really need an extra 3 or 4 feet to walk around it) I'm building a smaller 5'x12' table, since a friend is letting me leave that machine set up in his shed, but I don't want to be one of 'those' kind of friends that wears out a welcome.

You'd be surprised how much easier alot of things become when you can draw it on the computer, then go over to a cnc router and cut it. I've got tons of 1/8" thick aluminum sheet drops (mostly 2'x4' to 4'x4', as most of my suppliers only stock 4x12 foot sheets these days), as well as a boatload of 3/4" and 1" square, 3/4"x1 1/2" rectangle and enough aircraft hardware to choke an elephant.

My next self build camera will be a modular monorail, similar to a toyo, hoping to keep the out of pocket expenses to under $50 (nearly $20 more than what I spent on my 8x10, no less!). Though it's really not fair, as I have alot of tools, hardware and resources that most don't, but hey, that's life I guess. For the first time in my life, I've been in the right place at the right time.

BTW, I'm working on a 4x5 monorail design that can be easily routed out of mdf, and uses readily available hardware, ideally selling them for very low $$$ (<$100 less bellows, which straight bellows aren't that hard to make, heck my 2nd attempt at tapered bellows was workable, should only get better as I make more), and a future design that has either an octagonal or circular front standard, with the same shape bellows. (I've really go to stop thinking this stuff up, that's what happens when you spend your entire life being creative and finally have some of the tools you need to make it happen.)


erie