This week I’ve continued to do a fair amount of design and prototyping, next week will probably see a transition into more production mode and also a move to working full time on designing the Chimney Piece - although things do tend to change, so we’ll see…?
First up this week I made a couple of short lengths of Egg & Dart on the two different CNC’s to get a sense of timing for cutting, ultimately we need to make 170 metres of this design for the cornice in the ornate room we’re working on. The first image is the model partially cut on the small CNC, the second image is a deeper version I created, which looks better, cut on the large CNC. Suffice to say this is going to take a long time to make so we need to think carefully about optimising and scheduling it. The third image is a stair-jig I cut for Alan, the slightly grumpy master joiner who works downstairs. Apparently someone in the workshop had thrown his old jig into the wood burner, at least he claimed that, so I made him a new one. Nice clean and accurate.
Next up I become Ikea for a day and made a set of MDF shelves for my dad’s new digs. They had to be quite a specific size so there was not really an option to buy a set that fits. I also wanted a chance to test out the new CNC on the type of work it’ll mainly be used for. You can see the parts being cut on the big CNC in first image. They fitted nicely into an 8’ x 4’ sheet of 18mm MDF (how’s that for mixed units of measurement). The second image shows a test fit before the parts were painted. The third image shows the shelves undercoated, glued and screwed together. I’ll fill the screw holes, sand this back and then it’ll get a finish coat of paint on it next week. Although simple these turned out very nicely and all fitted together beautifully.
Finally this week I had to design and prototype a panel that can be used to go on the wide ceiling beams in the ornate “cherub” room we’re working on. I remixed a couple of the designs we’ve used for the client before to create a flying cherub for the corners and then a semi-symmetrical design for the middle of the panel. The idea with these is the raised and fielded panels (the backing piece) can be installed and then the carvings will be added afterwards. This will allow installation without waiting for the several weeks of carving I’ll need to do. To get the corner angels to fit over the fielded area of the panel I carved the back first, hollowing out a shape that matches the lowered area on the edges of the panels, this can be seen in the first picture. The material was then flipped and registered to carve the front of the corner angels and the larger centre design which can be seen in the second image. The last image shows a rough cut MDF panel (the dark bits are sanding sealer around the edges) with the carvings laid onto it roughly in position. This will get a bit of a sand, then be glued and painted to create a mock-up we can use to get design approval and check the fit. I’m pleased with how this looks and think the idea of making the carvings and panel separate makes sense both from a design and scheduling point of view. Once we finalise this I’ll be making 21 sets of carvings, so its good to get it right before we start full production.
