For the last three days of this week’s work, we were in the workshop processing the pile of Oak timber that makes up the vertical elements of the window frames. It is ironic because the weather forecast said rain on all three days but actually the second day (Friday) didn’t have any rain what so ever! But we just got on with the job of planing and cutting the oak.
We went through the usual process of planing one side of the 26 timber pieces and one of the edges, working on the top configuration of the planer with its two long extensions, before transforming the equipment into the thicknessing mode and planing the second side and the other edge, all to a known width and thickness. While doing this process, we realised that some of the current oak pieces were not going to be good enough so we got three more rough timber pieces off the storage rack and included them in all this stage!
When we finished we rejected the worst three pieces (they went back outside to the rack) and so we had 26 finished pieces.
Sides-planed-to-size
The next day was building a template to guide the router with a ball race parallel cutter, to shape the end with a 6 degree slope and turning at a certain point to finish off flat. This shape matches the surface of the sills, and lines up at the back where the glass will sit.
The template was made of two pieces of hard cement boards, screwed onto a piece of wooden batten and then sliced in the chop saw with the 6 degree angle. This was then screwed together to a base board and that was screwed to a long double sided rail that holds the oak pieces. Then each piece was inserted into the template and the end routed to shape.
Start-with-square-end
run-router-along-jig
end-up-with-base-of-side-shaped
The last step in this day’s work was to cut all of them down to their required length of 1654mm long, carefully setting up more end blocks and supports, to make sure that all pieces were cut to exactly the same dimensions.
That was day two and we now have a pile of 26 proper length oak pieces, with the special shaped bottom ends.
The last day (Saturday), we had to do the other ends, which in some ways, were more complicated because it has four individual cuts to be made, two across the grain and the other two ripping down the grain. We took thirteen pieces and clamped them all together so we could run the track saw at the precise position, to cut across the grain. Then rip across the end to remove the resultant blocks. The “waste” blocks were quite large, 30mm thick by 34mm long and 46mm high.
Lastly, we put together another template jig, this time to guide the battery saws to cut off a thin slice and that finally made the “pillar” which will fit up into the header frame of the windows. This piece of removal was only 3mm thick by 66mm by 45mm.
Saw-Horizontally
and-vertically
Top-of-a-side-completed
All-sides-done
This concludes all the work on these vertical side pieces of the Window Framework. The next rainy day task is to plane more oak timber but this time, the two sides of the octagon “pillar” that sits in between the sill and the header, on each side of the window. It might be more than a week before we get back to the workshop as there is a hot weather front coming in from Europe next week so we will be getting on with the roof.