In Projects, Shop Blog, Techniques

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Most woodworkers design and build furniture that is rectilinear and orthogonal. This spares us from having to think too hard and reaching back into our high school geometry lessons. It also spares us the expense and use of a compound miter saw. But any woodworker knows that if they work wood for too long, eventually they will have to face compound angles and surfaces. Splayed legs and sides such as those of the dough box are excellent examples. When dealing with splayed legs and sides noting is as it seems. Instead of right angle rectangles we face trapezoids and parallelograms with non-right angles. There are no right angle rectangles to be found. SketchUp’s Push/Pull tool can become a foe instead of a friend.

If I haven’t scared you enough already, take a look at my August 15, 2011 Chiefwoodworker’s Newsletter article titled Compound Miters for N-Sided Tapered Boxes as an example of the the math behind compound angles. Perhaps in a future post I will rewrite this article to cover the Dough Box and show you how to derive table saw and miter saw settings from it for building the Dough Box. But for now our problem is modeling the Dough Box.

Picking up from where we left off last week, on Part 2 we will model the aprons and add their mortise and tenon joinery. In Part 3 we will draw the sides and ends and create the dovetail joinery. Finally in Part 4 we will draw the top and discuss the peculiar nature of spayed legs, sides, ends and joinery. For today I again will use a video to demonstrate modeling of the aprons and joinery. Get your popcorn, the projector is rolling.


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