Woodturning Wedgie Sled Fix

[Music] hi there i got a letter this week from megan emberton in utah and megan has a wood turning channel called woodturning by me get it megan emberton m.e never mind i want to say thank you to megan for sending this to me it'll be on my virtual wall now whenever i use it and i hope you'll take a moment or two and take a look at her channel subscribe see what she's doing send her a little love thanks again megan for sending it in and now i'm going to go and get a few things put together here and i'll show you what today's video is all about i'll be right back i have four segmented rings here left over from previous projects this one has 24 segments these two are both 16 and this one is 48. now one thing to keep in mind is that the wider the segment is this is the width of the segment across here is the length the wider it is the more likely you are to see a gap this 24 segment ring is real good came out just fine but i started seeing some problems recently i did a 48 segment clock turned out real good but some of the viewers said they would like to see me do a 60 segment clock so that there could be one segment for each minute okay never thought of that so i decided i would do that so let me show you what i was doing these are the parts for my wedgy sled this is the wedgie sled itself this is the adjuster which i use to adjust the length of the segments and this is an insert for my table saw with a little wedge-shaped bar on the side for the segments to roll away from the blade this is the wedge i made up with my cnc router to cut 60 segments i don't have the real good and expensive software to use with my cnc machine so i had to draw it up in a drawing program called inkscape save it as an svg file and that import that into my cnc software i did it three times and every time i had a problem where there would be a gap first i'm going to show you what i mean by the gap and how i fix that in case you have to do half ring segment gluing as you can see there is a huge gap between these two halves of this ring what i want to do is trim them off on my sled the two clamps you see are holding that one half of the ring down and the inside points are even with the cut edge of the sled now with that first half ring cut i can clamp down the second half and do the same on it [Music] and that should leave me with two half rings that will glue up perfectly okay what did i really mean when i said perfect i didn't mean it turned this into a perfect 60 segment ring i meant that cutting with the sled to clean up those edges allowed me to glue this back up and the joint is perfect but if you look closely hopefully this will show up on the camera you can see that one side of that joint is tapered but the other one is basically a rectangle so while from a distance this might look okay it's certainly not good enough to do a clock with it just wouldn't work now what caused this i'm convinced it was not in fact this wedge the wedge i believe is perfect the problem when i looked closely turned out to be the sled now as you know as i know as we should all know it for woodworkers wood moves even dry wood like this will move eventually and i hadn't checked it i so i hadn't noticed but this particular one right here had moved a little bit and when i put a straight edge along it finally i could see that there was a slight gap there was a bit of light showing there and that's all it takes because if i take a piece of wood that's straight along here and push on it against that area then it's bringing this end out and totally ruining the angle so i took these off i jointed the edges put them back on and i think this is going to work out perfectly so now what i have to do is make another 60 segment ring and just see how well that turns out have you ever had one of those days so i decided i would make another 60 segment ring dialing everything in just as well as i possibly could and this is it and i noticed when i put it together there was some light showing on the inside between some of the rings and i couldn't figure that out i mean it just made no sense how much more can i do to make it work right so i thought okay i'll make another one so i made another one and i honestly forget i think these are three inches wide and i'd expect to see a lot of light coming through but i didn't right at the end in a few places you could see just a sliver of light but very little now this didn't make any sense to me at all i had sanded all the fuzzies off just as well as i did that oh that reminds me someone asked me recently what i mean by sanding off the fuzzies well when you put these put your board through the table saw on the bottom they're going to be little slivers if you want little what i call fuzzies also on whichever end comes through last the same thing so i just take sanding blocks i sand those off real well because if you leave them there and they get between the segments you're going to have a problem things are not going to line up right okay so where was i oh yeah so i went back to this one thinking how can this one show light between them if this one doesn't and i looked at it and i looked at it and finally noticed that where there are four segments between each of these walnut segments one of those quadrants if that's the right word and five segments in it all the other ones had four and what do you think could that maybe throw things off just a little bit it did so now i've got it dialed in and i can make these perfectly um what i what i'm going to do with this though is i'm not going to glue it up in one piece i'm not going to do a half ring because it's not working i'm going to do it probably in four quadrants because i found when i glued this one up by the time i got around even using titebond 3 which has a long open time it was drying up and i couldn't get it to clamp up properly i had a heck of a time with it so because of how many segments there are i'm probably going to do this in four quadrants and we'll see how that works out one thing i should probably mention some people may not know what i'm talking about when i say that i'm gluing up a ring in a half ring method by that i mean taking half of the segments on each side of these two dowels so in this case there are 30 on this side 30 on this side when you put the glue on and tighten it up with the clamps they can shift on these dowels so if there are any gaps in there and if there aren't why would you do this but any gaps that are in there will close up because it's able to shift after you've glued it up when everything is dry and you take this apart if you put a straight edge across here and across here you will find that at least one of those is not straight there is going to be a gap when you put them together so what i do is i'll take a pencil and i'll color in on both of those surfaces all four of them then i'll take one half of the ring and i'll put it on this sandpaper i've used six inch by 48 inch sanding belts and i've got 150 grit on one side and 80 grit on the other side of this quarter inch glass so it's nice and flat take that and just move it along there until all those pencil marks have disappeared and then you know then you will know you've got a straight edge on both of these then you can take those two half rings put them together and glue them up and you're done in this particular case i didn't want to do that because if i'm doing 60 segments for a clock it's going to show up somewhere on a lot of things it won't matter okay so what else can i come up with to show you about this well you've probably had enough of listening to me babel i want to thank you for stopping in if you got this far in the video thank you i'm impressed now if you think someone out there might be able to get something out of this video please share it with them it'll help my channel might give them a couple of ideas i know i learned a little bit about the wedgie sled myself getting to this point so again thank you for stopping in to those who have subscribed before thank you so much i can't begin to tell you how much i'd appreciate it and if you haven't subscribed i hope you'll consider doing so and click the notification bell so you'll find out when i get the next video out if you like this click the like button share it with others and please come back next time between now and then have a great day in your shop and be safe bye bye now [Music] you

Channel: Gord Rock

Views: 3,235

Rating: 4.9660296 out of 5

Keywords: woodturning, wood turning, Gordon Rock, Wedgie Sled, Wedgie, Wedgies, Wedge, Wedges

Id: Yj2IZr7mvNU

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021