I finished off the body of the “Gamble House Inglenook Sconce” today. I have to make the “lid” or “roof” still, and I have no idea how to do that. Anyone have any suggestions? I can bandsaw it close, but I only have a 1″ wide re-saw blade for my bandsaw. I could order a 1/2″ or 3/8″ blade I guess, but it will take a week or two to mail order a custom length blade (I have a WWII era DoAll bandsaw, they don’t have these blades at the local woodcraft store).
The top piece is about 7.5″ wide, so I can probably get the cut close enough that I can then sand it into submission from there. I don’t see another practical way to do it. Maybe you could hog out the material using a dado head going across the grain, and just take stepped cuts at the ends.
I was wondering how you were going to do that. You could cut a kerf every 1″ or less whatever your comfortable with down close to the line and chisel the waste out. That would get you close. Maybe sand paper on a dowel to finish the shape. What you have done looks great.
I think some 120 grit sandpaper on a large dowel or tube will work to get this smoothed once I have it roughed. I did a test piece on my belt sander with a 6″ diameter contact wheel and it was very close. It’s just a bit dicy to do it that way, super easy to gouge the wood.
Now that I’ve done a “practice piece” (read: “screwed up the first attempt”) it looks pretty do-able. It wasn’t a good piece of wood anyway.
Man, that looks really nice. It kinda looks like a band saw job. I might use rasp or spoke shave (probably rasp cuz it looks pretty fragile). I’m bettin’ you’ll be doing a lot of test pieces trying to sort that out.
One practice piece down 🙂 I cut it close(ish) on the saw and sanded out the inside curved on the wheel of my belt sander. It’s close, but not quite. I think I can get it bandsawn and and then dial it in with a rasp and sandpaper. But I need to glue up another (maybe 5 or 6) top blanks first.
Looking good. Are glass panels going to replicate the original or will you deviate some?
I’ll try to copy the original as closely as I can. Same design, probably different glass.
Joe
I just stumbled on my pack of scrollsanders from Olson. Check them out.
http://olsonsaw.net/scrollsanders.html
José
That’s pretty slick. I put strips of PSA sandpaper on a strip of metal and used that in my friends scroll saw. It worked OK, but didn’t last as long as you might hope. I might have been running it too fast, come to think of it.
I think I’m going to get a scroll saw the next time I need to do something like this. It’s pretty handy.