Before last week, I'd never heard of a shooting table. But when a customer requested a beefy one, and I read a little more about it, I took on the job of making one from solid Baltic Birch plywood. Three solid inches of plywood!
This thing is a beast!
After making the blank, I needed to mount some custom made metal legs - speaking of beasts, these legs weigh 25 pounds a piece, and are welded from 1/2" steel stock.
Ri-donk-culous!
We used three legs instead of four, so that the table would sit without rocking wherever it might be placed. For stability, I needed to mount the legs equidistantly from the center, so my next step was to draw a large circle on the plywood top. Finding the center was easy - draw lines from corner to corner and their intersection is the middle. While I was at at it, I drew some lines at 120˚ intervals, making the position of each leg.
Last step? Draw a big circle using that counterpoint. But since it was pretty large, and the compasses around the shop were much smaller, I needed a device for drawing larger circle.... hmmm.....
Enter my Veritas Beam compass.
To be truthful, this hangs on a peg most of the year, but when I need it - there's no better way of drawing circles.
It consists of four parts,
and once they're attached to a long 3/4" piece of scrap wood,
you have a large compass at your disposal.
Put the pin end in the counterpoint, and move the other end to the radius that you want.
It's the most low tech, yet effective system there is!
I'll tell you this - I don't use it often, but there's NO better way to draw large circles.
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