well Harriet really likes to build play houses using boxes and blankets and
chairs so I thought I build a series of arches to help build such play houses
and I figured I'd make these arches out of bent lamination which is just a
series of thin strips which are quite bendable and then glued together to hold
that shape and experimenting with different thicknesses of wood I think it
needs to be about this thin to get enough of a radius that I want if it's
too thick like this one it'll break before I can bend it to the right radius
I'm gonna try to take four of these strips and bend them into one of my
arches without a bending form let's see if that works
break I've got some gaps between the layers fine Lucia and clap the scripts
together that should force them together better when I tighten the radius the
sliding will force them together a bit more now I got to wait for the glue to
dry on this one before I can reuse the clamps for the next one here's the third
one glued up and when I took the clamps off over the first two yesterday the
glue wasn't completely dry so I put a clamp on the end to keep this from
trying to straighten itself out because that has a tendency to separate the
laminations quite a bit of spring back on these arches fortunately the exaction
doesn't really matter that much
so with these three artists now I just need something for them to plug into so
I need to cut some mortises in these rails some square-ish mortises and I
need to cut those fairly deep and I'm going to use the pant rotor for this and
to get the right width I'm using a template where I can move the follower
up and down a bit so that I'm essentially cutting wider than the bit
and this is a new variable mortise and tenon template where you can configure
it with different segments for different lengths I couldn't quite get the right
length out of this one so I put this piece on backwards and a piece of wood
in here to get the right stroke length in there