I used my Shopsmith router chuck and guard for exactly one project:
rounding this over
There's a story here. I was in the middle of building my home theater. I had build a stadium-style seating platform (you can
see it here, somewhat). The carpet guys came in at the scheduled time to put the carpet in and said "Nope, we can't do it." It turns out that they needed a bullnose to bring the carpet down and around, because the way the geometry of the multiple levels was, they couldn't use one big seamless piece of carpet, and needed a place to tuck under and seam.
So, I had them reschedule me for a few days later, and frantically tried to come up with a solution to retrofit a durable bullnose to my simple 2x box framing. My solution was:
1. Cut the plywood back around the edges.
2. Rabbet out a corner of some 1xsomething trim wood which would take the place of the plywood.
3. Round over the remaining thick piece of the stock.
I couldn't just screw a piece of bullnose trim sideways onto the platform since I'd be screwing right into the point where the plywood and dimensional lumber joined up - not a very durable solution. So, by making new trim which took the place of both the outer plywood and the bullnose, it was much stronger. Wood glue and screws were used liberally. Looking at the picture, it looks like I actually made the bottom of the bullnose out of a separate piece and glued it. I think I glued up a thin piece to the 1x6 first, then rabbeted and rounded the glued-up piece to its final shape. I'd forgotten about that until now.
The Shopsmith router was a little scary at first. I had never used a router of any type before, and figured out darn quick that there was a wrong and right feed direction. The noise from the headstock also scared me, as it's the first time I ever moved the speed dial up from sawing speed. It sounded like a car going past redline. I was able to use the quill depth lever to fine-tune the position of the roundover bit relative to the top of the workpiece, which is both handy for tuning, but also a bit annoying to have to keep track of if you are working with different stock thicknesses.
Some pictures of the nearly-finished project can be
seen here. As you can see from the dates, it's one of those projects where I'm just about done but never finished. It looks pretty much like that today. I still need to get DVD shelving put up against the back wall, and get some crown molding put in to dress up the ceiling. I also need to replace that monster of a projector. That thing was old-tech ten years ago.
- Chris
