Fun with angles

 It's that time of the year - time for cleaning, finishing up some projects, and planning for what needs to be built going forward. 

After finishing that huge Sapele linen cabinet that frankly, was a little overwhelming, 

I wound up with a stack of cut-offs from the lumber I was using. (Thanks for the major help with that, Ken!)  They weren't long - maybe ten inches or so, and it was either - use them, give them away, or burn them. 

I love this calculator for building with segments. It lets me design a frame like this, tweaking it until I have the specifications that I want. 

I started with 16 pieces, about 10" long and 3" wide. Of course I Domino'ed them! 

It starts with gluing together two pieces. 

And then gluing that set into a 4-piece set. And so on...

When you start getting larger segments, the clamping can be a little tricky. In this case - a clamp is needed end-to-end, but the force of that makes the miter want to come apart, so a perpendicular clamp is needed. Also - an extra set of hands is nice to have.

 These two "quarter segments" now get glued into a half. And so on... until I had two halves. 

Here's the best part - once you have two halves, you can check the joints on the two halves, to see if they mate correctly. If not - you can correct the angles slightly, to make you look like a woodworking rockstar. That sketch below shows that the two haves are slightly off, but easily corrected. 

Which is what I had to do, slicing a hair from each segment until they matched perfectly.  

Clamping that was a little tricky - the strap clamp needed to put this together has to be HOW LONG??

Well - if that circle has a four-foot diameter, what's the circumference? Well, I guess it's a good thing math is my friend. So here's how you calculate it:

Circumference of a circle who’s diameter is 4 ft

C = 𝜋⋅𝐷

Let 𝜋 = 3.1`416

C = 3.1416 ⋅ 4 ft

C = 12 and 354/625 or = 12.5664 ft

Answer is: 12.5664 ft

So the bigger question is - who has a strap clamp that is 13 feet long?

NO ONE! But in a pinch, a towing strap will work, along with a couple of long bar clamps. Of course, I forgot to shoot a picture, but trust me - it worked.

And here's the final piece, assembled and ready to be cut into a circle.

 I added a temporary center piece, to attach my router/compass.

 It was fairly easy to find the dead center, measuring from a few different sides, to find the center point.

 My router set-up for cutting circles isn't fancy - but I'm not spending hundreds of dollars on a compass jig that I use 5 times a year. Oh, and I need a new knob on my router base, but this wooden replacement works too. I'll replace it the next time I order tool parts, so this is a temporary fix.

Wonder how my round frame turned out? Stay tuned...