11-19-2015, 02:51 PM
Haven't started a new thread here in quite a while. Fact is that I took a hiatus from most of my woodworking for a while.
My older daughter is getting married next month to a guy we like very much. When her sister got married a couple of years ago, that daughter asked me to make a Unity Sand Ceremony stand for their service and it was pretty nice. This daughter wanted me to make something for her, too, and it's also for their Unity Ceremony at the wedding. When I first saw what she wanted, my eyes got wide and I said (literally), "Oh, Shi....."
I knew it was going to be hard.
Here's the final product (minus the name plaque which will go where the green tape is located):
For those who are interested, there is a lot of religious symbolism in the woods I used. The red padauk represents the blood of Christ and the black walnut and the light maple represent the darkness overcome by the light of Christ.
The actual pieces of wood also have meaning. The padauk and walnut came from Woodnetters; the padauk as a gift. I purchased the lighter (curly) maple on the Christmas Auction and the "stylized" center piece came from the same board I used to make the Unity Sand Ceremony piece for my other daughter's wedding. The "nails" that hold the inner cross to the framed cross are made from redwood that came from her grandmother's lawn furniture. Since my younger daughter is the matron of honor for her sister, I really like the connection between the pieces for their weddings.
The way this works is that the whole thing comes apart before the ceremony. The groom puts the framed cross into the base, the bride puts the stylized cross inside of it, and the bride, groom, and pastor each put a nail in to hold it all together.
Anyway, here's the build-along portion. A lot of this was done using hand tools.
The first thing I did was to make a template for the framed cross This was done using power tools, including the pocket screws to hold the arms to the upright of the cross. I don't have an individual picture of the template, but you can see it among the other prototypes in the picture below.
I had to make prototypes of everything. I wanted to be sure that the framed cross was going to be strong enough, so I made a piece out of scrap and did some "destructive" testing on it.
I squeezed the prototype in my hand to try to break it. It took a pretty significant amount of force to break it, so I knew the glued miter joints would be strong enough without any kind of reinforcement.
Next, I made the laminate of the walnut and maple for the framed cross. You can see a remnant of that in the picture of all the prototypes. A lot of this was also done using power tools.
The next step was to cut all of the miters. This was pretty delicate work. I borrowed a small miter box from Joemac (thanks Joe!!) and it worked oh-so-much better than a power miter box would have worked. Some of the pieces were quite small and there might have been some safety issues with a power tool, also.
Each piece was cut a bit long with the miter box, then trimmed to size and to the correct angle using a low-angle jack on a shooting board equipped with a Donkey's ear. This picture shows my clamping protocol, which was a bit complicated considering the 12 pieces involved. I figure that each of the miters had to be +/- 0.1° because the cumulative effect of error over the 24 miter cuts would have been enough to have a pretty significant gap in the joints and would seriously compromise the strength of the frame.
Here's the framed cross after glue up.
Continued on the next post.
Blaine
My older daughter is getting married next month to a guy we like very much. When her sister got married a couple of years ago, that daughter asked me to make a Unity Sand Ceremony stand for their service and it was pretty nice. This daughter wanted me to make something for her, too, and it's also for their Unity Ceremony at the wedding. When I first saw what she wanted, my eyes got wide and I said (literally), "Oh, Shi....."
I knew it was going to be hard.Here's the final product (minus the name plaque which will go where the green tape is located):
For those who are interested, there is a lot of religious symbolism in the woods I used. The red padauk represents the blood of Christ and the black walnut and the light maple represent the darkness overcome by the light of Christ.
The actual pieces of wood also have meaning. The padauk and walnut came from Woodnetters; the padauk as a gift. I purchased the lighter (curly) maple on the Christmas Auction and the "stylized" center piece came from the same board I used to make the Unity Sand Ceremony piece for my other daughter's wedding. The "nails" that hold the inner cross to the framed cross are made from redwood that came from her grandmother's lawn furniture. Since my younger daughter is the matron of honor for her sister, I really like the connection between the pieces for their weddings.
The way this works is that the whole thing comes apart before the ceremony. The groom puts the framed cross into the base, the bride puts the stylized cross inside of it, and the bride, groom, and pastor each put a nail in to hold it all together.
Anyway, here's the build-along portion. A lot of this was done using hand tools.
The first thing I did was to make a template for the framed cross This was done using power tools, including the pocket screws to hold the arms to the upright of the cross. I don't have an individual picture of the template, but you can see it among the other prototypes in the picture below.
I had to make prototypes of everything. I wanted to be sure that the framed cross was going to be strong enough, so I made a piece out of scrap and did some "destructive" testing on it.
I squeezed the prototype in my hand to try to break it. It took a pretty significant amount of force to break it, so I knew the glued miter joints would be strong enough without any kind of reinforcement.
Next, I made the laminate of the walnut and maple for the framed cross. You can see a remnant of that in the picture of all the prototypes. A lot of this was also done using power tools.
The next step was to cut all of the miters. This was pretty delicate work. I borrowed a small miter box from Joemac (thanks Joe!!) and it worked oh-so-much better than a power miter box would have worked. Some of the pieces were quite small and there might have been some safety issues with a power tool, also.
Each piece was cut a bit long with the miter box, then trimmed to size and to the correct angle using a low-angle jack on a shooting board equipped with a Donkey's ear. This picture shows my clamping protocol, which was a bit complicated considering the 12 pieces involved. I figure that each of the miters had to be +/- 0.1° because the cumulative effect of error over the 24 miter cuts would have been enough to have a pretty significant gap in the joints and would seriously compromise the strength of the frame.
Here's the framed cross after glue up.
Continued on the next post.
Blaine
I made a few different varieties out of cherry and you can see those in the prototype picture. The "heads" of the nails and the taper of the body were the challenges. I also wanted "red" for the nails, and remembered I had the pieces from Grandma's lawn furniture. Redwood splinters, but after a few prototypes using it, I (and the bride) am satisfied.
