Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Door Panels -- Milling experiments



I started on milling a prototype panel. I thought that choosing a panel with large simple geometry would be the easiest, but I was wrong. Because the cuts were larger than the router base, I kept having to shove in awkward pieces of thin plywood as a scaffold to replace the support lost from the removed material. I experimented with using different depths of cut for the different branches but it was unnoticeable so I instead experimented with a dado line between branches to mark a visual boundary but I think that this too is unnoticeable so I will abandon that in all the future cuts. This prototype ended up pretty ragged but it is the bottom panel of a workshop door so I probably won't bother replacing it. The picture shows the panel before staining.

One unexpected thing that I like is that the inner layers of plywood have defects and I think that the knots add to the feeling of the tree I'm looking for.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

That looks really cool. I want to see the whole tree.