Dutch Table. Poor man’s lathe duplicator.

Or read this in Russian

It’s been a while since my  last post, most of my work now is commissions. that I cannot show till December, sorry. I hope that in few months I’ll be able to show it all in details. I haven’t worked on my art nouveau cabinet since August, mostly because it was hard tget used to the fact that I have a baby girl,  and she doesn’t really like all the noises from tablesaw and such. Then I started learning Rhino 3d program, later SolidWorks.  I was so into Rhino that I actually design all the furniture pieces in it, Sketchup had to go 🙂

Well, back to work. In my last post I wrote about Dutch table that I made for commissioned roombox. So I’ve changed it, completely. The decoration part were scaled down a bit, the shape of the leg is different now.  Usually I don’t mind making such changes, but this time it was very hard – it’s almost depressing to have to change things, when you have a baby (ugh, those sleepless nights:)), and I don’t have grandmas and grandpas to help me out, and  you have to go back and start from scratch. grrrr. But there was no choice, the form of the legs was bad. I started with 3d model, here it is:

It’s made with Rhino 3d. Quite complicated form, the widest part is 19mm in diameter, the width of the square is 10mm. It’s a lot of material to waste. I wish I had duplicator, again, usually I manage without it with good results, but this time I needed something that just worked for me. Something that would allow me to make identical legs without constantly measuring and comparing. The solution was easy, I’d call it poor man’s duplicator. Take or buy some chisels, mine were dirty cheap, you’ll need to change the angle of sharpening though. Using 3d model (I printed front view on A4 paper) trace the shape on a chisel and cut it (I used Dremel). And here you go:

A bit closer:

Some elements can be broken, so it’s very cool  to have 1mm and 2mm round profiles, takes seconds to cut them on lathe. Really cool! Besides, you can use scalpel old blades for such small details.

It takes some time to make such profiles, but in the end it becomes very easy to cut shapes, and they become perfectly identical.

I’m in the process of making chairs and also made the profiles, it’s very very easy to cut small diameters.

As for the table  – here it is:

No shellac yet, I’ll do it later when all the furniture is made.

It’s a shame, but all these details will be covered with textile, so basically it was almost a waste of time, but I’m glad I tried something new.

By the way, couple of days later i found the same method in The Scale Cabinetmaker, so the idea is not new, but it’s great anyway.

Tags: 1/12, carving, furniture in miniature, wip