I want to carve a wooden chain out of one piece of wood
without any gluing, and I want to do that with
as little hand-carving as possible
by using a pantorouter, and a router bit, like this
to kind of route all of the areas in between.
The end profile, looking from this side on the chain,
would look something like this.
So, I'll cut that profile on the table saw.
Now, I need to route out this "H" shape between the links
and I'll do that with the pantorouter
and a pantorouter always reduces by one half,
so I made a two-times print-out, to make a cutting template
for this
Here's my half inch follower, and just making sure that
goes in all the grooves.
With the router bit resting on the table,
my follower bearing should be flush with the bottom edge
of the template. And, the mounting holes are at
about this height, so that's where I need to drill the holes.
With the follower bearing in the top slot,
I just barely clear the top of this
and if I put a bearing in the bottom slot,
I should be just below.
That piece that broke off, is actually part of
the last partial link, so I don't actually need that.
Each link uses ten centimeters,
so I just now need to rotate that piece,
and move it by ten centimeters further over.
From one link to the next it's ten centimeters.
So, I always took my work piece, and moved it
by ten centimeters, and rotated by 90 degrees.
Except then I realized my mistake, because if I go from
one link to this link, it's only five centimeters,
so this was useless, but I still had a little bit
of work piece, so I could make three links, and that
seemed to work. So, I got a new work piece,
and let's try that again.
Next I need to separate the pieces, I need to
drill out this part here I'll do that by drilling
from here, and from here
and instead of the pantorouter, I'll use my
slot mortiser for that.
The pieces are separated in here now, and the only thing
that's holding them together is cause they're joined
here, and at the end. But, I can kind of bend these
like that, so next I need to cut these links round.
I need to hold these very firm while I'm cutting them because
I don't have any support directly under the blade.
I'm adding a support underneath as I cut the other
side, because as I cut them they start to come loose.
So, now I just need to cut these bits out
and it really will be a chain.
Now, I still gotta clean up this mess in here,
and I'll do that on the drill press.
And, now comes the sanding. Lots of sanding.
OK, this is getting a bit too tedious
so I'm just gonna cheat a little bit, and use
a hand tool for this. But it could be done
with all power tools.
What I would do different next time is
not make the slots, that I cut along here, come out
quite this far, so it has more of a roundish, like it did
in my initial design. I think the mistake
I made here is I cut too much of a gap
out between here, and so between here and here
I just didn't have enough room for curvature.
I should probably also have put these a little bit further
apart in the wood, which also would have given me
a bit more room to get a nice curve here.