This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

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BuckeyeDennis
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This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by BuckeyeDennis »

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This thread is not about a “cookie-cutter” jig, per Merriam Webster’s definition above. I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

Now pardon the double entendre, but in a different sense this thread quite literally is about a cookie-cutter jig. I designed it for chainsaw-milling “tree cookies”, aka “tree slices”, aka “tree rounds”. So without further ado, here’s a picture of the strange contraption.

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What possessed me to create this thing, you ask? Well, my youngest daughter was soon to wed, and I was enlisted to produce the “tree cookies” for the wedding-reception table decorations. It’s just a matter of making some nice flat parallel crosscuts through a log, bark and all. The cookie thickness isn’t particularly critical. So it should be pretty simple, right?

Well, once I started thinking through the details, it turned out to not be quite so simple after all. I vacillated between making a sled and table extension for my 12” height-capacity Jet bandsaw , or a fixture for my Granberg G555B chainsaw edging mill. (Long-time forum members may recall that chainsaw mill from the heart-pine mantel project that I posted back in 2015.) I was leaning toward the bandsaw sled concept, and even had it roughly modelled in Fusion 360. But I eventually realized that if I went with the chainsaw-mill approach, I wouldn’t have to start from scratch. It would be a piece of cake to mount a guide board for the mill atop my portable WoodAnchor™ fixturing grid worktop, and the worktop itself would make a fine platform for holding the logs.

As you can see in the pictures, the chainsaw-mill guide board is mounted to the worktop on two 13” tall riser posts. What you can’t see is that the whole guide assembly is attached to the fixturing slots with just two tie rods running through the centers of the riser posts. It’s a simple concept, but even with a Shopsmith, I wasn’t excited about trying to accurately drill 13” long through holes. So instead, I made each post from two pieces of 2x4 construction lumber. I face-jointed the boards on my Shopsmith jointer, and then milled a 5/16” groove along the centerline of each piece on my Shopsmith OPR table. Once the halves were glued up, the grooves formed a clearance hole for ¼”-20 threaded rod. WoodAnchor sliding nuts attach to the bottom ends of the threaded rod, and the guide board has countersinks on top for washers and hex nuts. It's a knock-down assembly that goes together super quick & easy, and is absolutely rock-solid.

The challenging part of the jig design was devising a way to fixture irregularly shaped logs. After spending way too much time contemplating various ways to cantilever the logs out from a mounting bracket, it struck me that I could instead mount sliding wedges to WoodAnchor fixturing slots, basically creating split-Vee blocks that could be adjusted fit to almost any log.

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My original plan was to mount the wedges directly to the fixturing-grid table. But I quickly learned that advancing the log for the next cut was no fun at all that way, as it required unstrapping and re-strapping the log for each cut. And even worse, it messed up the wedge adjustments. What I needed was a sled for the wedges and the log.

By this point I was almost out of time, so I grabbed a partial sheet of ¾” MDF that was left over from a different project, and made a quick-and-dirty sacrificial sled. My WoodAnchor router slotting guide made very short work of milling it. MDF mills easily, so I skipped the pre-slotting step, and the Whiteside router bit still cut the MDF like butter. But it also unleashed an absolute dust storm, so I was very glad that I was doing it outdoors, and wearing an N95 mask!

If I were to design a jig for serious tree-cookie production, I’d probably cook up a segmented sled, so that individual segments could be removed before they reach the cutting plane. But this sacrificial sled was just fine for my one-time use. The one pictured here yielded twenty-three 1-1/2” thick “cookies”, plus 5 taller “stands”, while consuming less than $5 worth of MDF.

The wedges, however, aren’t sacrificial. So as you feed the sled forward, you simply remove the farthest-forward wedges before they reach the sawing plane. If and when you reach the last two pairs of wedges, you’re finished with that particular log. Not shown in the pictures, I used a couple of clamps mounted to the fixturing grid for immobilizing the sled during chainsawing.

The logs were from a black cherry tree that blew over a couple of weeks before the wedding. It was our next-door neighbor’s tree, in the woods only about two feet from our property line. The nice straight 12” diameter section is to be milled into a mantel for my neighbor’s son. I basically got the firewood pieces. No problem -- the picture below shows how the adjustable half-Vee’s can conform to pretty much anything.

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Last edited by BuckeyeDennis on Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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BuckeyeDennis
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

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The half-Vee wedges are kind of interesting in their own right. By pure coincidence, they’re also made of black cherry. I’d been saving a bunch of small cutoffs from a different project, and they were just big enough to yield a wedge or three each. The first “Aha!” moment for the wedges came when I realized that I could mill tongues on the bottoms that fit nicely into WoodAnchor fixturing slots, and still leave plenty of shoulder for vertical alignment and load bearing. As luck would have it, the tongue bit from my T&G router bit set could be shimmed to mill 31/64” thick tongues, and it made super-fast work of the milling.

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It’s probably obvious from the picture above, but the wedge mounts to the fixturing slot with a long button-head screw and a sliding nut. In the picture below, you can see the alignment pins that keep the sliding nut properly positioned. I cut the nut-clearance slot into the tongue with my Mark V, using a few passes over a 3/8” dado stack that I usually keep set up on my dado arbor. A sacrificial auxiliary fence on the miter gauge, with a stop block clamped on each side to limit the cutting width, let me knock out all ten of these slots in just a couple of minutes.

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There’s no fumbling around when installing these wedges in a fixturing slot. Just drop the front of the tongue into the slot at the edge of the table, slide the wedge forward, and the nut is guaranteed to engage the slot perfectly.

When I first made the wedges, I still hadn’t figured out a great way to anchor the log hold-down straps. And then the new sacrificial sled threatened to make that even more difficult. Which led to the second “Aha!” moment: make the wedges double as adjustable tie-down points. A hole added near the top of each one makes a dandy attachment point for the ratchet-strap hooks, and the adjacent mounting screw pretty much guarantees that the hole can’t split out. The chamfers on the holes aren’t for aesthetics; they were necessary in order for the S-hooks on the ratchet straps to fit. A zero-flute countersink bit did a very nice job of forming the chamfers.

And boy, once this jig was finished, did it ever make some sawdust!

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Sorry, no pics of the ensuing stacks of tree cookies. The sawdust pic above was taken after dark, on the very day that the cookies were due at the decorator’s house. My wife took them away from me before I even had time to grab a camera! But to prove that it did happen, here’s one of the outdoor table settings at the reception.

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I would have never thought of slicing up tree cookies as table decorations myself, but I've gotta say that the overall effect was very nice.

I know I covered a lot of ground pretty quickly in this thread, so just fire away with any questions. For my part, this project gave me a lot of new ideas for 3-dimensional fixturing with the WoodAnchor system. I’ll do another thread on those when I have pictures or drawings to illustrate.
Last edited by BuckeyeDennis on Tue Oct 26, 2021 8:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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algale
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by algale »

Your jig looks better than most of my projects. The cookies came out very nicely!
Gale's Law: The bigger the woodworking project, the less the mistakes show in any photo taken far enough away to show the entire project!

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BuckeyeDennis
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by BuckeyeDennis »

algale wrote: Tue Oct 26, 2021 7:42 am Your jig looks better than most of my projects. The cookies came out very nicely!
Thanks for the kind words, Al. But the truth is, in any beauty contest with your Slow Boat to Nowhere, both the the jig and the cookies would fare very poorly indeed!
Hobbyman2
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by Hobbyman2 »

the Jig looks better made than most commercially produced products, nice job
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by JPG »

++++++1111111

Ah the 'joy' of having a challenge that serves both a personal purpose and a more mercenary purpose.

Let's see, 12 anchor nuts at @ xx, 10 long screws @ yy, 2' allthread @ zz, . . .


Doubt the decorator has a clue how much effort you put into this.

I truly appreciate the mind set demonstrated.
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╟JPG ╢
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Goldie(Bought New SN 377425)/4" jointer/6" beltsander/12" planer/stripsander/bandsaw/powerstation /Scroll saw/Jig saw /Craftsman 10" ras/Craftsman 6" thicknessplaner/ Dayton10"tablesaw(restoredfromneighborstrashpile)/ Mark VII restoration in 'progress'/ 10
E[/size](SN E3779) restoration in progress, a 510 on the back burner and a growing pile of items to be eventually returned to useful life. - aka Red Grange
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BuckeyeDennis
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by BuckeyeDennis »

JPG wrote: Tue Oct 26, 2021 11:32 am ++++++1111111

Ah the 'joy' of having a challenge that serves both a personal purpose and a more mercenary purpose.

Let's see, 12 anchor nuts at @ xx, 10 long screws @ yy, 2' allthread @ zz, . . .


Doubt the decorator has a clue how much effort you put into this.

I truly appreciate the mind set demonstrated.
Busted! :D

But I'll bite, re. the cost analysis.
  • The 12 sliding nuts retail for about $60. But this is a one-time use jig, so they can be "borrowed" temporarily from other jigs.
  • The 20 alignment pins retail for $4.90
  • The sacrificial sled consumed $5 worth of MDF
So the total one-time expense here is about $20.

My fallback plan for the wedding was to just buy some tree cookies. They're available from Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc. But they run upwards of $10 each in the sizes that I cut, and aren't as nice as the black cherry. So THAT outlay would have been about $200, which is considerably more than the retail price for ALL the WoodAnchor stuff, including the router bit. And I'd still wouldn't have the taller "stands", as they would be cost-prohibitive to ship.

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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by JPG »

Plus I assume you WILL/HAVE get/gotten them back to use in the future(after drying out).
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╟JPG ╢
╚═══╝

Goldie(Bought New SN 377425)/4" jointer/6" beltsander/12" planer/stripsander/bandsaw/powerstation /Scroll saw/Jig saw /Craftsman 10" ras/Craftsman 6" thicknessplaner/ Dayton10"tablesaw(restoredfromneighborstrashpile)/ Mark VII restoration in 'progress'/ 10
E[/size](SN E3779) restoration in progress, a 510 on the back burner and a growing pile of items to be eventually returned to useful life. - aka Red Grange
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BuckeyeDennis
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by BuckeyeDennis »

JPG wrote: Tue Oct 26, 2021 1:49 pm Plus I assume you WILL/HAVE get/gotten them back to use in the future(after drying out).
My other daughter is getting married next summer ( :eek: ), and she's already claimed the tree cookies and stands.
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Re: This is NOT a cookie-cutter jig!

Post by Rubiru »

BuckeyeDennis wrote: Tue Oct 26, 2021 3:10 pm
JPG wrote: Tue Oct 26, 2021 1:49 pm Plus I assume you WILL/HAVE get/gotten them back to use in the future(after drying out).
My other daughter is getting married next summer ( :eek: ), and she's already claimed the tree cookies and stands.
Your daughter is so lucky because she got you as a father. When a father has a cookies cutter machine so why don't wishes cookies. congrats sir, fulfill her wishes and get love.
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