I decided to try my hand at making some jewelry boxes. I purchased barbed hinges and the slot cutter but I am a little leery of chucking it up in my DP and jamming the box into the blade to cut the slot ( the whole process seem fraught with danger). My question is: has anybody come up with a safer way of performing this operation? I was thinking of making a home made miter box of sorts where i could spin the cutter with a small motor and move the spinning blade into the box instead of the other way around. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Replies
What about the Lamello duples hinges?
http://www.csaw.com/lamello/hinges.html
Work Safe, Count to 10 when your done for the day !!
Bruce S.
Pardon my ignorance on this process, but when I think "slot cutter" the next word that comes to mine is "router." as in "router table" Can you enlighten me?
As for bringing the cutter to the stock, I would think that approach is much more likely to result in miscuts. If the cutter is chucked up solid, and you're sliding the box on a solid, flat table, the results are bound to be more consistent.
Just winging it in a mental preview, I'd want to anchor the left side against the fence and a block, making that corner a pivot point, and then slide the box into the cutter. On a drill press, the object wants to spin clockwise, so anchoring that left corner is a counter-measure.
This is what I am referring to:
http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=18652&filter=27646&pn=27646
Holy Smokes, those are expensive!!! And it doesn't even include the arbor, right?
I've been Googling on those slot cutters from Woodcraft, and so far am finding more questions than answers. Will continue, just out of curiosity, but in the meantime, click here for an excerpt from a Taunton book on box making. The author uses some kind of trim-saw blade in a router table with a special fence. Interesting.forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
the arbor is another $42. The trouble with using a router is RPM, the max I've heard is 3000RPM, a router is usually a lot faster than that.
No, you're right, you don't want to put that cutter on a router (though at least one person has, evidently). I was thinking more of the slot cutters that are available for router use. Don't know if there's one the right size out there or not.
Moot point, I guess, looks like you got a reply from someone who's 'been there, done that." Finally! Hope it all works out.forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Can you measure the arbor hole, diameter and thickness of the blades?
They look like they might fit into a biscuit joiner. The biscuit joiner blades are 4-inch diameter, but they might plunge deep enough with a smaller diameter. I'm pretty sure the PC will, because it has the FF blade which is 2.5-inch diameter.
If the arbor hole is 7/8-inch, (22.225-mm), it will probably fit into a Porter Cable, and most other biscuit joiner have a 22-mm arbor hole.
If you clamp a fence on the DP table to the left of the blade/arbor to hold the work against as you advance it into the blade, and a stop/rear fence to limit the depth of cut, this should be a pretty safe and low sweat-factor operation since with the fence and stop, there's really no place for the workpiece to go except where it's supposed to. I've never used this particular blade on a DP, but have used other cutters this way without any nasty surprises. If you're really nervous, you could easily fashion a sliding carrier to clamp the box to for this operation, but that's probably overkill. You can also fashion the depth stop/rear fence like a router table fence so that the blade is largely covered and protected while in use.
Note that when used for cutting like this, I like to bring the table up to the blade and use the quill depth only for fine adjustment, rather than simply lower the quill to the table, since (at least on my cheapo DP), that seems to reduce the chatter that can otherwise occur.
Mike HennessyPittsburgh, PA
I occasionally use the barbed hinges on my boxes. I bought the cutter and mandrel at woodcraft. There is, or was, a link on the Woodcraft site for using a jig to cut the slots accurately. I made mine out of 3/4" birch plywood and it's a simple 90 degree fence about 5" tall on a base, with 2 blocks behind to support the fence. Just mark where you want to make the cuts in the lid and the box, and the cutting goes very easily. Of course you'll want to use stop blocks on the drill press table so you cut the slots to the right depth. I happen to have 2 tracks on my Delta drill press so I also attached runners on the bottom of the jig to ride back and forth in the tracks. You can use a hammer to flatten a hinge leaf and use that to gauge how deep your slots are. Make sure you make the two extra cuts on the back of the box, a 45 degree chamfer for relief so the lid can open, just behind the hinges, and another tiny flat cut for relief for the hinge barrel itself. If you don't do it that way, there's no way these hinges will work. If you're going to make a bunch of boxes all the same size at the same time, these hinges make the work very fast. If you're making one box, it's not worth the time to set up IMHO. I prefer inletted hinges, using the method described by Doug Stowe using his "flipping stick". Very precise and easy. It's even shown on his box making video.
Edited 1/9/2009 8:59 pm ET by Lantyr
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