Hi,
Thanks Mark for your most kind comments.
Please have a go at veneering as it will possibly drive you mad at first but once you get the hang of it veneering does become much easier; these jobs are like trying to ride a bike for the first time but persist and you get there; the rewards are great and once you have veneered and finished a wreck of a cabinet it gives such a great feeling of satisfaction.
Regarding home made router cutters. I'm used to using lots of different types of cutters from lathe tooling to end mills so all I needed to do was to sort out what I wanted to achieve and work from there. It sounds easy put like this and it proved to be so in practice.
Silver steel is readily available in many diameters and can be used to make all kinds of cutters including cutters which cut metal if the bit is heat treated either before or after the required profile has been added. I bought a couple of lengths of 1/4" Dia silver steel but I could also have bought ready tempered tool steel and ground it to size.
The length of the new router cutter was decided upon and a blank cut from the length of silver steel; this steel is very tough even before tempering but cuts with decent tooling like an hacksaw.
It was chucked in the three jaw on the Myford and the end reduced to the exact diameter to match the new stringing/banding which I believe was something like 80 thou (0.080") for a length of 1/4". Next job was to gently file the flat using a small square file and a taper was added to give a shear cut as can be seen in the picture. This was just a guess because I didn't even know if it would work or not but I had high hopes.
At this stage it was still just an idea but I like to experiment and decided not to heat treat the new cutter because steel is tougher than wood anyway and I wanted to prove my idea before getting too technical.
The cutter fitted into the router collet perfectly as expected because silver steel is finished to very close tolerances. It was then easy to try a few sample cuts using the router free hand as can be seen below. The cutter did a wonderful job without over heating and continued to do so as it sank all the grooves for the stringing in the side panels. As the last bit of cutting was done the cutter started to lose its sharpness but lasted just long enough to complete the job. For the top panel I simply made another new cutter. By doing the job this way it saved me the problem of hardening and tempering the cutters but should I have had a lot more grooves to cut I would have done the tempering. The blunted cutters can now be used for other types of tooling as silver steel is handy stuff to have around even in short lengths.
I hope this answers your question Mark and just about any size cutter could have been made.
Kind regards, Col.
Thanks Mark for your most kind comments.
Please have a go at veneering as it will possibly drive you mad at first but once you get the hang of it veneering does become much easier; these jobs are like trying to ride a bike for the first time but persist and you get there; the rewards are great and once you have veneered and finished a wreck of a cabinet it gives such a great feeling of satisfaction.
Regarding home made router cutters. I'm used to using lots of different types of cutters from lathe tooling to end mills so all I needed to do was to sort out what I wanted to achieve and work from there. It sounds easy put like this and it proved to be so in practice.
Silver steel is readily available in many diameters and can be used to make all kinds of cutters including cutters which cut metal if the bit is heat treated either before or after the required profile has been added. I bought a couple of lengths of 1/4" Dia silver steel but I could also have bought ready tempered tool steel and ground it to size.
The length of the new router cutter was decided upon and a blank cut from the length of silver steel; this steel is very tough even before tempering but cuts with decent tooling like an hacksaw.
It was chucked in the three jaw on the Myford and the end reduced to the exact diameter to match the new stringing/banding which I believe was something like 80 thou (0.080") for a length of 1/4". Next job was to gently file the flat using a small square file and a taper was added to give a shear cut as can be seen in the picture. This was just a guess because I didn't even know if it would work or not but I had high hopes.
At this stage it was still just an idea but I like to experiment and decided not to heat treat the new cutter because steel is tougher than wood anyway and I wanted to prove my idea before getting too technical.
The cutter fitted into the router collet perfectly as expected because silver steel is finished to very close tolerances. It was then easy to try a few sample cuts using the router free hand as can be seen below. The cutter did a wonderful job without over heating and continued to do so as it sank all the grooves for the stringing in the side panels. As the last bit of cutting was done the cutter started to lose its sharpness but lasted just long enough to complete the job. For the top panel I simply made another new cutter. By doing the job this way it saved me the problem of hardening and tempering the cutters but should I have had a lot more grooves to cut I would have done the tempering. The blunted cutters can now be used for other types of tooling as silver steel is handy stuff to have around even in short lengths.
I hope this answers your question Mark and just about any size cutter could have been made.
Kind regards, Col.
Happiness is a wreck of a cabinet to restore.
