Boingo Posted May 2, 2007 Share Posted May 2, 2007 My MG34 is taking forever, especially since I have been lazy the last two months, but yesterday and today I made some excellent progress. Two months ago, I built a duplicator. It is a simple set up where a free floating stylus is connected to a router. As the stylus is traced over the contours of an original, the router bit follows the same path, carving a piece of wood into a rough duplicate of the original. Click here to see a video of a duplicator in action. For an original I used the butt section of that vacuuformed piece of garbage from Cushman. It was not good enough to be used itself, but once I filled it with plaster to make it stiff, it was good enough to use as a rough form for a piece of wood that would be further carved and modified. The victim of my experiment was a piece of black walnut from a branch that fell into my brother's back yard last year. (He was actually planning to use it for firewood!) Anyway, this is the result I got ... In this scan, the piece is still rough, but I have since smoothed it out with my skillful use of the belt sander, and a heck of a lot of hand sanding. I am currently trying to hollow the darned thing out so that the buffer seat can sit inside. The power drill and the drill press have both failed, the forsner couldn't handle the hard black walnut, and the spade bit was threatening to tear the whole thing apart. My only reliable tool is proving to be a dull 50 year old brace and bit my father left here, but I will keep in trying. It is looking like I am going to end up with a really decent quality butt when I am done. Wish me luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SethB6025 Posted May 2, 2007 Share Posted May 2, 2007 Wow, that is impressive! That walnut has to be hard to work with, I had installed new doorknobs on a couple old walnut doors in my old apartment and nearly burned out my drill doing so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boingo Posted May 2, 2007 Author Share Posted May 2, 2007 Well, the walnut stopped the 1 5/8" forsner bit cold after just a few revolutions, and the spade bit bounced and chattered around so badly that I decided to quit with it before it had a chance to grab and spit all my hard work into pieces. The brace and bit is working, but it is old and dull, and holding the poor butt between my knees in lieu of a vice, which I do not have, is proving to be very very difficult, but I am almost to the proper depth now. Once there I should be able to round the hole off into the proper size with a sanding drum. <http://www.doomlegends.com/deimwolf/mg3 ... 01-05-2007 if you want to see. >> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TK-459 Posted May 3, 2007 Share Posted May 3, 2007 That's awesome. Very cool. It reminds me of Stelarc's "Third Hand". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boingo Posted May 7, 2007 Author Share Posted May 7, 2007 This scan is actually from last Wednesday or Thursday, but it shows how nicely the butt has been going. Since this scan was made, more sanding and detailing was done. The butt was stained last night, and will be varnished some time today. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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