At this point, Doug Hicks has glued up the laminated legs for the side table and cleaned up all of the excess glue on the legs by running them through his thickness planer. Then, before cutting the legs to length, he made one pass on all four edges of each leg with an 1/8″ roundover bit mounted in the router table. Let’s pick things up from there. Read the rest of this article »
Once Doug had the bending jig completed, he was ready to get started building the legs for the side table.
RIPPING THE LEG STRIPS
With the bending jig all done, I actually started making the legs. The first step was to rip a number of thin strips from 6/4 (1-5/16” thick) cherry. After some experimenting, I discovered that I could bend an 1/8”-thick strip around the arc of the jig. Any thicker than that and it wouldn’t bend around the jig without breaking. Since the finished legs were to be 1” thick, that meant I needed 8 strips per leg, or 32 strips for all four legs. Read the rest of this article »
Recently, Doug Hicks decided to build a much-needed end table for a spot between two easy chairs in his home. After spending some time with his wife Cathy, designing the table and making a cardboard mock-up, Doug got to work by making the bending jig. The jig makes bending the thin laminated leg strips to shape easy.
MAKING THE BENDING JIG
In building the table, I figured I would start with the most difficult part – the legs. And since the legs were to be relatively thin (1”) I decided that the strongest way to make them would be using a bent lamination technique. This involves gluing together a number of very thin, flexible strips and placing them in a bending jig to dry.
So the first step was to build the jig. I found some old exterior 3/4″ plywood left in the attic by the previous homeowner and decided to use that. Something like MDF (medium-density fiberboard) probably would have been better, but hey, “ya use what ya got,” right? Anyway the plywood worked fine. Read the rest of this article »