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I saw a picture of a cool looking clock and thought to
myself, I should make one of those. Now I've done this many times
before: see something that catches my eye to spark a new project. And
while I was thinking about how to make this, I thought I'd add a
personal touch here and there.
After mulling it over what it would take to make one of
these clocks, I decided to make some tooling to help me. Now I've said
this before, I don't like making tooling but sometimes it's a
necessity so that's what I'm doing below. And to do that I'll be using some pine, which should work good for the short run
of parts I'll be doing.
Tooling
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After cutting my pieces to length, I ran
them all through my planer to flatten them out.
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I also cut a small amount off each long side with my table saw to end up
with
some nice edges to glue them.
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Here I'm putting in four clearance holes for some bolts. This will make
sense soon.
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I need a 14" circle for my tooling so I had to improvise with this
string and pencil. My small compass only makes a eight inch circle so
this method worked...but not very well.
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I'll be using my rotary table for this project because it will provide
two things: it will make my parts nice and round and second, I can index
it to any degree that I want. Now you can see why I put those four holes
in earlier, to clear those 3/8" bolts.
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I used eight screws to hold down the the top piece to my 2" X 4"s. Now
everything is secured to my rotary table.
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After a few minutes of cutting, I now have a 14" round piece of tooling.
Why this size? Because that will be the size of my clocks.
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To make sure the top surface is nice and flat, I took a clean-up cut
over the entire surface with my fly-cutter.
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Let's Get Started
I'm going to make the clocks out of MDF or Medium
Density Fiberboard for a couple of reasons. First, it's very flat and
that's exactly what I need. Yes I could have made these out of any kind
of wood that I wanted but that would mean I'd need to run them through
my thickness planer. However, with these clocks being 14" diameter and
my planer maxing out at 13", that wouldn't work. And second, the only
surface that you'll see once they're finished is the outside diameter (O.D.). With that being said
I'll just paint the O.D. and back and call it good.
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