I finally freed up some time away from running the DR to spend a little time in the shop this afternoon. I installed the cedar strips holding the liner for the lid in place. The top liner piece is free-floating in the lid so it is free to expand under the influence of the humidity inside the box. The strips holding it in place are glued to the sides of the box and serve to hold the liner in place. First thing you have to do is figure out how wide those strips should be. Remember that the edges of the main liner stick up above the sides of the humidor box about 5/16" so you have to make the strips in the lid just wide enough to let the lid close without interference. So you have to measure pretty carefully.

So then it's off to the compound sliding radial miter saw to carefully miter the support strips to length. This is a task demanding a high degree of accuracy so the joints look nice and everything fits just so. I usually cut the pieces a tad oversize and then carefully, carefully trim and try until they just drop into place. This calls for working with tolerances in the low thousandths of an inch. Consider that a piece of typing paper is about .004" thick. These pieces fit tighter than that.

After everything is fit up I smear just enough glue on the back side of the strips to get them to stick firmly to the sides of the humidor lid. Then clamp in place with all the small clamps you can get your hands on. There is NO such thing as too many clamps in a shop! The second picture shows the desired fit on all four corners. Tomorrow I'll take the clamps off and start the finish sanding process. That should take a while since I'll probably work down to 320 grit.

Looking good Ken.  How many more hours of work do you think it will need?

Awesome update.

Quotefretburn - 4/24/2012  6:07 PM

Awesome update.

x2

Quotefretburn - 4/24/2012  6:07 PM

Awesome update.

x2

Quotenwb - 4/24/2012  8:53 PM

Looking good Ken.  How many more hours of work do you think it will need?

Not too many. I sanded it down to 150 grit before assembly so now I just have to go back and take any scratches out and then sand down through a couple more grits...say three or four or five hours maybe to get it just so. The Watco Danish penetrating oil stain/finish takes about a half hour to apply and then needs to dry for a couple of days before I wax it. Then I have to fit the hinges which is another picky job but not terribly time consuming. The last step is contouring the edges of the liner so the lid will close smoothly. It all really depends on when I'm able to peel off time to get into the shop and that is moderately hard to come by what with the outdoor chores and this and that all going on at the same time.

Nice job! I totally agree about the clamps. Last week I had to borrow a pile because I didn't have enough for the oak staircase I was installing at home. My pal came across with about thirty clamps.

Sounds good Ken - just eagerly awaiting the final product.

QuoteRingadingh - 4/24/2012  9:20 PM

Nice job! I totally agree about the clamps. Last week I had to borrow a pile because I didn't have enough for the oak staircase I was installing at home. My pal came across with about thirty clamps.

The equation for the total number of clamps needed for any project is ALWAYS N = X + 1.

Looking fantastic Ken!!!

looking good. keep up the good work

Awesome work Ken!  Eagerly awaiting the finished product.

cant wait to see this finished!

Looking great! Can't wait to see it all finished!  

Keeps getting better.

Nice work and I love the cross cut 45 angles you must have the saw on a perfect zero tolerance how the heck did you get it that tight? I need to get my saw that good mine is a little off.

Quotenwb - 4/24/2012  9:22 PM

 just eagerly awaiting the final product.

x2

Quotehorrido - 4/25/2012  7:21 AM

Nice work and I love the cross cut 45 angles you must have the saw on a perfect zero tolerance how the heck did you get it that tight? I need to get my saw that good mine is a little off.

Tweaking a saw just takes patience. Mine, fortunately, is fairly easy to set up but the job still takes an afternoon, a few cigars, more patience than I usually have, and a good supply of scrap lumber. In this shot, the red arrows point to a couple of adjusting bolts. The bolt on the left sets the 45 degree angle and the one on the right handles the 90 degree angle. The green arrow points to the adjustment ring used to set the blade at 90 degrees to the fence. The first thing I do is adjust the 90 degree bolt in the back to set the blade at a perfect 90 degree angle to the base. I sneak up on this angle by making test cuts and checking for square with a precision square (Incra). Don't trust anything less than a square you KNOW is 90 degrees. After I get the blade perfectly straight in the up and down direction I loosen the ring pointed out by the green arrow and incrementally adjust it until the cut is perfectly square across the board. Once those two operations are completed successfully the 45 degree angle across the base is automatically taken care of. Then I go back to the bolt on the left in the back and adjust the 45 degree angle of the tilted blade as is shown in this shot. Like I said, these operations try my patience.

I forgot to point out that blade deflection under load can skew your adjustments so even with a perfectly set up saw I usually wind up tweaking the miter joints with a big 45 degree chamfer bit in the router table. Softer woods don't usually upset things too much though. The harder woods tend to cause the blade to move ever so slightly out of line sometimes.

 

Looking great! Excellent work!

QuoteAlphairon - 4/25/2012  8:23 AM

Quotehorrido - 4/25/2012  7:21 AM

Nice work and I love the cross cut 45 angles you must have the saw on a perfect zero tolerance how the heck did you get it that tight? I need to get my saw that good mine is a little off.

Tweaking a saw just takes patience. Mine, fortunately, is fairly easy to set up but the job still takes an afternoon, a few cigars, more patience than I usually have, and a good supply of scrap lumber. In this shot, the red arrows point to a couple of adjusting bolts. The bolt on the left sets the 45 degree angle and the one on the right handles the 90 degree angle. The green arrow points to the adjustment ring used to set the blade at 90 degrees to the fence. The first thing I do is adjust the 90 degree bolt in the back to set the blade at a perfect 90 degree angle to the base. I sneak up on this angle by making test cuts and checking for square with a precision square (Incra). Don't trust anything less than a square you KNOW is 90 degrees. After I get the blade perfectly straight in the up and down direction I loosen the ring pointed out by the green arrow and incrementally adjust it until the cut is perfectly square across the board. Once those two operations are completed successfully the 45 degree angle across the base is automatically taken care of. Then I go back to the bolt on the left in the back and adjust the 45 degree angle of the tilted blade as is shown in this shot. Like I said, these operations try my patience.

I forgot to point out that blade deflection under load can skew your adjustments so even with a perfectly set up saw I usually wind up tweaking the miter joints with a big 45 degree chamfer bit in the router table. Softer woods don't usually upset things too much though. The harder woods tend to cause the blade to move ever so slightly out of line sometimes.

 

Thanks, I think I need to revisit the steps on how I had tried to get it perfect. The few mm out makes a decent job look shady. I wonder if the saws hinge pin on the arm where it rotates was build crappy at the Chinese Factory - Can not find built in the U.S.A you know the good stuff that used to built on this side of the world before greed started to get a great name here.

Very nice! Keep up the updates

Nice work Ken! Keep 'em coming!

I'm finish sanding it now. I hate sanding...I really hate sanding...I REALLY, REALLY hate sanding. Oh, by the way, I don't like sanding.