Cutoffs. And a little about finish.

Today I took the great step and sawed off the large woodblocks from the legs.

And a little about what I use for finish.

At first I sand the piece with several grades of sandpaper for a smooth and even finish of the wood.

Then I apply 2 coats of pore-filler. I use a product from Graupner called GlatFix. It is a cellulose-based porefiller and it can be coloured with spitit bases stains if necessery. A light sanding between the layers.

Then I apply two or thre layers of model-aeroplane dope with sanding in between. Aeroplane-dope again is a cellulosebased laquer. It stinks but I like the resulting finish.

. I have tried cellulose-based laquer from our local paint-store but even when thinned it is not as good as the dope.
When the dope has dried about 24 hours I all faces with grade 000 steelwool.

Status of today.

What is missing? Two finials, Drawer handles. two rlarge osettes. Lots of time until my deadline so maybe I should start another 1/24 project :-)

Have fun
Niels

Top molding

Like on the 1/48 high-boy the top molding is milled with a lot of parallel cuts using a 0.1mm v-cutter. It takes about 1½hour for the cnc-machine to finish the job so no mistakes in the mounting.

End-view of molding

To ensure square mitering I use the sandingdrum setup.

With that setup very little material can be removed.


And the molding in place

The camera ran out of battery :-(

/Niels

Drawers (again)

The front veneer should extend the drawers a little (0.2mm) on three sides to hide the gap between the drawer and the rails and dividers.

Sanding the sides:
I use a piece of 0.2mm brass to ensure same distance on all sides. The sandpaper is attached to a piece of plywood with doublefaced tape. Such a block is flat and last for very long time. When filled with dust a blow of compressed air brings it to life again.

 After sanding down to size.

Next is bevelling the fronts a little. (Hopefully the same amount on all drawers.)

/Niels

Center drawers

Before leaving home I had to se the result of late evenings work with the drawing program.

Original shell from the back of Norman Vandal's book "Queen Anne Furniture"

And my test. Few small adjustments to be made, but.

Off to real size work :-(
/niels

More photoetchings

Spend part of the evening etching escuteons for the highboy.

Result looks good but I forgot to take care of the height of the smallest drawers.
On the high drawers it looks good.

Closeup

And closeup of small drawer.

 The escuteons will be used for drawerhandles and keyholes but I will trim off the "roof" on all of them before mounting. Again think twice.

The closeup photos was taken with this setup.

My Pen-Epl2 with adapter from micro-four-thirds to fou-thirds mount plus a 25mm extension tube and at last an Olympus 14-45mm lens. The extension tube makes it possible to take macro or close-up photos with a standard lens.

 /Niels

Kronborg Castle

A while ago I worked for a company that have a "Clean Desk" policy.

Today a little  tour in the good weather to Kronborg Castle.

Several pieces of interesting furniture but most of them too big to replicate for the small dolls house rooms.

This cabinet has some very interesting veneering. The only miniaturist I have seen doing the same type was the late master  Barry Hipwell.

Detail

When home again I cut the veneer for the drawerfronts. Yesterday I glued the two book-matching pieces of veneer and sanded down to 0.45mm with a thickness sander.

Glueing veneer to draverfront. The fronts is made from 0.4mm plywood so warping wil hopefully not be a problem.

The two top and bottom centerdrawers will be made later.

This evening the highboy looks like this.

/Niels

Measure once, Cut twice

I had to redo the lower part of the 1/24 highboy because the depth of both upper and lower was nearly the same.
There isn't space for the lower molding.

Wrong.

New

 The lower part could be reused in another project at a later time (or scratched)

 Have fun. And measure twice before cutting!
/Niels

1/24 is BIG (2)

Parts for one of the drawers.

Assembled drawer

From the bottom

Sidepanels with legs.

Testfit of drawers in lower part

From another angle

Testfit of upper drawers

1/24 is big. I can work without magnification most of the time.

Have fun
Niels

1/24 is BIG

Next few weeks will be very busy. Not very much writing maybe progress photos.

Drawers for highboy in 1/24 scale. Fronts is 0.4mm plywood because then I kave more than 3 layers of wood and therefore less problems with warping when applying veneer.

 Legs compared.

Have fun
Niels

Hint: Read instructions carefully and in good time. I just discovered that current projects does not fit in my current category. Some of you may guess why :-)

Top molding

The solution for the topmolding was to make 17 parallel cuts in different depths with a 0.1mm 10degree V-cutter.

I have applied a single coat of laquer because then it is easier to justify the result.

Another solution could have been using different cutters as with the original but my smallest round nose cutter is 1mm in diameter and the molding is 1.6mm across.

Below is the cutting steps for the original molding.

Screenshot of cad-program with a lot of parallel lines. Every line is placed in its own layer in the drawing because they will be cut in different depths. The drawing has been rotated to match major grain direction of the wood that later will be cut out.

And screenshot of molding profile.

The red line is the molding profile made by tracing a scan of the original drawing and then resized down to 1:48 scale, the yellow is the parallels and the blue represents the v-cutter.
From the drawing the cutting depths is measured and later used in another program that generates the codes for the cnc-machine.

Photo of V-cutter.

The tip is 0.1mm and the V-angle is 10-degrees.
Pro: V-cutters are cheap. (A 0.1mm standard cutter costs 40-80USD and breaks when you think about using them.)
Cons: The V-shape of the cut.

Have fun
Niels

Give up? Start all over? Lower ambitions!

Friday afternoon I was in a bad mood.  I didn't feel good with the aprons on the lower case.

The aprons didn't look as I wanted! They should fit behind the knee of the legs like this photo shows.

After a break. Walk to the libary etc.. I decided to continue a little less amditious.

This is how the lower part looks today. (The holes in the back is my invention. With a small pushstick you can push the drawers out from the carcas. Handles in the will be too small.)

I dropped to put aprons on the sides, too.


The upper part looks like this just now.

I spend the evening figuring out how to make the curved moldings. Tomorrow will show.

Spring is coming.

Have more fun
Niels