The jig is up

My picture frame did not fit really nicely. It had its gaps. Now, I am used to furniture. If furniture does not fit well I tweak it a little. With picture frames it is another thing completely. As I said, when I laid this thing out I had very primitive tools.  But when I was a lowly Officer Candidate in the U.S. Air Force there were three possible answers to any question: yes sir, no sir, no excuse sir!  In this case the correct answer is the third -- no excuse, sir. The frame did not fit.

Fortunately it came to me that I was neglecting a VIT (very important tool), namely the miter gauge (Britons read mitre gauge) that came with the bandsaw. This is just a very large protractor.

Beacuse it is so large, it is much more accurate than most store-bought protractors. I have a reasonably accurate shop protractor and I used that to lay out my shooting jig. But inexplicably the left side was off. By at least two degrees. When you are doing picture frames two degrees is suicide; it will never line up.  The right side was perfect; again inexplicably. There was nothing for it but to rebuild the jig. So I got a fresh piece of wood. Now I hate power tools, but I used the bandsaw (and its miter gauge) to get it right. No use introducing extra errors of hand wobble at this point.

Here is the new jig in action:

Ah, but there is more. All the lengths, inside and outside, must match. Elementary, my Dear Watson (which Sherlock Holmes never said. He said "elementary" any number of times; he said "my dear Watson" even more. Never did he put the two together). So we have a lot of fiddling (because it wasn't cut right in the first place)  to do and it is sometimes frustrating.  The shooting jig has no fine adjustment. I am enough  of a machinist to resent this! Version 2.0 will overcome all these faults. Darned if I know how yet.

But on to successes. The carving process left gouge marks all over the place. So I ground up a form tool out of a piece of old hacksaw blade. I collect old hacksaw blades for just such a purpose. I made  a paper template, ground the thing on a Dremel tool, and adjusted as I went along.

The left end of the tool rides on the straight edge of the molding. The tool shapes the molding. I use it by hand, although I could cobble up a scratch stock (q.g) to do it. By a remarkable piece of serendipity the other end of the tool, a conventional factory rounded edge, is just right to smooth out the middle. So we make progress. Very slowly, to be sure.

Disaster strkes again!

My son and I have a joint project. We will make custom picture frames. He will paint what goes inside. A Fair division of labor; beause I am not an artist. Oh, I will do a reasonably artistic carving. But that does not make me an artist! When we add computers into this mix of art and craft, we have a recipe for a disaster, and that's just what happened. I have no bones in telling you the whole thing. Someone may learn something from it, after all. The thing about our custom picture frames is that they should not be vanilla store-bought frames. They should be carved by hand. And shaped by hand. The latter idea is my contribution to art. So, OK, I have to make a frame for a picture, and I even have to carve it. I have been practicing the carving part . And making tools for it, because commercial tools fall far short. The carving is the easy part. Shaping the ground is the hard part.

So this is a very lengthy introduction to a new subject: making weirdly shaped planes. I have absolutely zero experience in the area. So please bear with me as I learn. Nowadays weird shapes are made with routers, but I defy any router user to make his own shaped bits. But before routers were invented people planed moldings with planes. So I have said, let us make two planes: a rounder and a hollow. Both semicircular. And here follows the tale of these two guys. Here's what I have learned. People have not done this for about a hundred years. Some have. But they are not easy to find. Furthermore, the ubiquitous router gets in the way.

First you make the blade. So I want one one blade that looks like a semicircle. I lay it out and I drill holes that match it.
Next step is to drill some holes close to the profile of the piece. There, I knew I could get a picture into this thing. After that it's all file work. Tedious. But art knows no limits. File away and you, too, may be an artist. Much more important yhat you understand what I am tryng to do than how I did it. After all I have yet to succeed. And that's where disaster comes in. I have so far ruined two hollows. More to follow.