Another finger box project

[tlempicke]

This is a quick and dirty box that I made up for my Grand daughter. Woods are Poplar and Mahogany. he lid was carved on the shopbot using Aspire. I then filled it with clear bar top epoxy. I programmed the sides a bit large on the mahogany portions and mitered them with my saw. Glued them up and here we are.

[myxpykalix]

That is VERY cool! Explain how you programmed the fingers and how you held your wood down. Do you have any pictures of your hold downs or while cutting? Also tell me about those hinges? EXCELLENT!!!

[guitarwes]

^ what he said.
Very cool. I love using contrasting wood. Really nice job on the tightness of the finger joints.

[tlempicke]

The fingers are really easy to do. Hinges came from Woodworkers.
Let me see if I can draw up something that will make sense and post it.

[tlempicke]

First I made up a grid. The fingers are going to be 2 inches deep and 1 inch high. Horizontals are 1 inch apart and verticals are 1 inch apart. (1 inch apart plus 1/2 inch right and left for the ends)



Then I populated the grid with circles 1 inch in diameter to create the female side. Use the snap to feature to draw the tangent lines between the circles and then the snip feature to get rid of the parts you don't want.


Now populate the grid with circles .010 smaller on the right and .010 larger on the left. Turn the female layer on and off as needed to see where to put the circles. This creates the male side.


So here is what the whole drawing looks like. To use this just turn on only the layer you need, either female side or male side, and the copy the piece, create a new drawing and paste the piece in.


If anyone wants the actual .CRV file I will be glad to send it. Just send me an E Mail.

[myxpykalix]

I had a question about your holddown method and sent you a PM.

[tlempicke]

Here are a couple of pix showing how I held the material down. During the actual cutting I had a piece 0f 1/4 in plywood under the piece to protect my table top. This is a table that I made a couple of years ago after a posting by Joe Coholic. The blue piece is a piece of T Track that I screwed down for another project and is so handy that i just left it. I used a piece of drill rod in the chuck, set it to 10.125 so that the edge of the rod was exactly where the center of a bit would be when it was at Y position 10. Now I just do a C3 move, a MY10 move and a ZY. That puts me precisely at the lower left corner of the material.

[Greencarvings]

There is nothing quick and dirty about that box. Miter boxes are pretty darn hard to get correct. They take a lot of trial and error. You have it down.

[dmidkiff]

Beautiful box!!! Thanks for the explanation of the drawing process and the pics of hold down.