Another day, another broken tool.
We started the day off replacing the tire of the bandsaw. There were quite a few videos online about how this would be a difficult task. The tires are very tightly fitted, and there were a lot of tips and tricks out there to get them on. We soaked the tire in some hot water and then used a couple small clamps to slowly jigger the thing on.
After that, we reassembled the bandsaw and got to cutting the other curved pieces. That was pretty short work. After cutting the first (of each type), we headed over to the drum sander to smooth out the curve. That is totally the right tool by the way. You can really see where the curve is a little elevated. Then we used that as a stencil to cut the other pieces the same way.
It was quick work getting all the cuts done before heading back to the drum sander for the finishing passes. Alas, that’s where we were struck again with a broken piece of rubber. One of the belts in the drum sander broke, causing the drum to oscillate wildly. The belt that turned the sander remained whole, so it still spun… but no more smooth up and down oscillation.
Once again, we called our day short.
I did some other work on the pieces though. I used the table router to take the edge off some of the pieces that wouldn’t be impacted by the join. It turn out the long angled edge of the main legs wasn’t quite straight. That was a bit of a curve ball when it came to the router, but I’ll finish that up with the handheld router later.
We were supposed to put the curve on the top of the legs with the drum sander–broken–so instead we put the curve on very delicately with the disc sander. That worked well enough for this piece, though it was difficult to get a steady curve that way.
Last, we took a look at a jig for joining up the pieces. It’s meant to clamp to either side of the end of the piece to exactly center the drilling for the dowel joinery we intend to use. You just select the placement and the size of the hole, and it handles the rest.
Coming up next then is fixing the drum sander, finishing the curved pieces, hitting a couple edges with the handheld router, and then laying out and drilling for the joinery.