#7 continues
My new drill bits arrived in the mail, so I popped one into my Dremel to make the starter holes to put the saw blade through to cut out the inner pieces.
It’s putzy work, but it went better Sunday than it did the week before. I’m still going through saw blades like crazy, but other than that I didn’t have much to complain about (for a change). Nice when the broken piece stays in the piece; at least then I can find it and throw it away.
I did the small pieces that I was resawing first. My process is to put the blade through the hole(s) and cut out the insides first, keeping the main piece intact. This gives them more strength through to the end, and gives me something to hold on to. Then I cut out along the outsides of the pieces.
It ended up that I will have to do 2 more of the triangular pieces in the middle. All 3 tips are super-slender, and they tend to break off with the last bit of sawing, no matter how careful I am. Occupational hazard, it seems. I wonder if it happens to Larry Robinson. I’m guessing not.
The next step is real tricky. I have to cut out the white space in the MOP, because I will put the abalone pieces I cut out first there, but I have to fill the abalone pieces with more MOP. It only makes sense to conserve shell and cut the black piece out and set it aside. So basically, in the main piece, I have to cut out each shape twice: once to get the piece I want, and a second time to get rid of the waste I don’t want. The first thing I needed to do was to decide where to drill the hole for the saw blade to slip through. I had a lot less room then I did on the first pieces. I marked the spots where I had the most space for drilling with a green marker.
Then I held my breath and drilled the marked holes. Not bad. There was only one spot that was a little iffy.
Despite trying to drill over the hole in my bench pin, I discovered afterwards that I’d missed. 5 times. Ah well; I don’t think these bench pins are meant to be eternal, and I know where to get another one when this one is past saving.
In this picture you can see a couple different steps happening. The top cutout has had the center piece removed and now I’m cutting out the waste along the edge. The cutout right beneath it is already cleaned out.
Ordinarily, when I’m cutting shell this narrow, it is breaking off every few strokes, driving me to drink. However, since I’m just trying to get rid of it, I didn’t mind, and it’s relatively painless.
Each time I’ve completed cutting out a section of the circle, I work on putting the inner pieces together, not moving on until everything fit. This took a lot of sanding and filing, and a little sawing, too, a bit at a time. That indicates I still need to work on my sawing accuracy, which isn’t news; better to file away, because you can’t put back what you’ve already cut off. But eventually I got it to work. Here’s the piece, ready to go into the space directly to the right.
Here it is in place, and from the back. There are some gaps, but by the time it’s filled with superglue and sanded down, they won’t be as noticeable.
And here it is from the front again.
At this point, I popped out the piece and superglued the 2 smaller pieces together, and put them safely away until its time to assemble the whole thing. 2 down, 11 to go. It will be a slow process, but it might just be really cool by the time it’s done if take my time. Doing it this way also helps me keep track of where I am, because the design is so repetitive. To the eye, it looks like it’s perfectly symmetrical, but when you start sawing the pieces out and trying to get them to fit with others (even allowing for my sawing), you find that they are not. Strange, that, since this is a computer-generated clip art design.
Other stuff…
In addition to my new drill bits, I ordered some sanding tape. I already had sanding cord for getting into nooks and crannies, but I needed something for small flat spaces that were too small to get a file into. I attach them to the bench with a clamp, thread the pieces onto it, hold on to the other end, and run the pieces up and down until they’re the way I want them.
Also, I’m enjoying the new kinder, gentler shell reclamation process that has come from attaching my patterns to the shell with Elmer’s glue. I drop them in a little water, screw the top on, and shake it from time to time. When I get back to them, the paper has removed itself, and I have clean shell to reuse later without hurting my eyes or giving myself a headache. Lovely! I keep an old pump bottle filled with water out on my bench, since I don’t have running water out there, and it works like a quickie faucet when I need a little water for this, or for my sharpening stone, or what have you.
More sawing next weekend!
