Wedding-flower stands
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2022 2:34 pm
Another year, another project for another daughter’s wedding! It’s in the rear-view mirror now, but there were some woodworking challenges that I thought might be of interest to fellow Shopsmith aficionados.
One of the groom’s sisters personally hand-made all the flower arrangements for the wedding, and their dad Bill volunteered to make a dozen tall flower stands. His plan was to slice up some ¾” plywood into 12” square stand tops and bottoms, and to use four pre-made dowels as each stand’s “legs”. The first couple of prototypes were a bit wobbly, which Bill attributed to a sloppy fit from drilling the leg mortises with a hand drill and spade bit. So he enlisted me to do the production drilling work with a Forstner bit on my Shopsmith.
I figured that would be a super quick and easy task. Bill brought all the parts over to my shop, and we proceeded to drill a couple of test mortises in some plywood scrap. And danged if the dowel fit wasn’t still sloppy. A few measurements later, we determined that the ends of the 48 oak dowels that he had bought at Big Orange, at a total price of about $150, were all seriously undersized. No way was I going to find a drill bit that matched the diameter of those things. But I figured that someone must make a tenoning bit that would let us turn the ends down to a standard size.
And it turned out that someone does. After some research, it appeared that a CMT plug/tenon cutter would be just the thing for the job.
But then, why modify a bunch of expensive dowels? I figured that they were defective, at least for joinery purposes, and the legs could stand to be a little beefier anyway. So Bill and I decided to slice up some ¾” poplar boards that I had lying around into ¾” square legs, mill round tenons onto the ends of those, and return the dowels for a refund. I modelled up the resulting stands in Fusion 360, and we got design approval from the boss.
The two tall stands were to have 48” long legs, and the 10 shorter ones (shown in the rendering above) were to have 32” legs. A Shopsmith in horizontal-boring mode was the obvious choice of machinery here, so I ordered up a 5/8” CMT plug/tenon cutter bit for about $30.
When the bit arrived, I did a couple of test cuts with it, and found that it was cutting the tenon diameters about 0.005” undersized, and leaving a slightly rough finish on the tenon. Upon close inspection, I found a couple of small machining burrs on the ID that I had missed before. So I polished those off with some fine sandpaper wrapped around a ½” dowel, and honed the front cutting edges with a diamond paddle for good measure.
Voila, my very next test tenon was absolutely beautiful. It fit snugly into my 5/8” Forstner-bit holes, with just a bit of twisting needed to persuade it to slip in. First problem solved.
Now we're getting to the part where things weren’t quite so simple anymore. The tenon lengths for the flower stand legs needed to be precisely controlled, so that the distance between shoulders would be the same for all four legs on each stand. And as the OD’s of the 5/8” tenons were only 1/16” from the faces of the ¾” square legs, the lateral positioning had to be pretty well controlled as well. I forgot to mention that the recommended bit speed for hardwood is only 300 RPM, so I had to leave room for my Shopsmith speed reducer. Bottom line, there was no way to use the rip fence as a backstop.
So a new horizontal boring fixture (end-working fixture, actually) for my Shopsmith was needed. In the next installment, I’ll show you what I came up with.
One of the groom’s sisters personally hand-made all the flower arrangements for the wedding, and their dad Bill volunteered to make a dozen tall flower stands. His plan was to slice up some ¾” plywood into 12” square stand tops and bottoms, and to use four pre-made dowels as each stand’s “legs”. The first couple of prototypes were a bit wobbly, which Bill attributed to a sloppy fit from drilling the leg mortises with a hand drill and spade bit. So he enlisted me to do the production drilling work with a Forstner bit on my Shopsmith.
I figured that would be a super quick and easy task. Bill brought all the parts over to my shop, and we proceeded to drill a couple of test mortises in some plywood scrap. And danged if the dowel fit wasn’t still sloppy. A few measurements later, we determined that the ends of the 48 oak dowels that he had bought at Big Orange, at a total price of about $150, were all seriously undersized. No way was I going to find a drill bit that matched the diameter of those things. But I figured that someone must make a tenoning bit that would let us turn the ends down to a standard size.
And it turned out that someone does. After some research, it appeared that a CMT plug/tenon cutter would be just the thing for the job.
But then, why modify a bunch of expensive dowels? I figured that they were defective, at least for joinery purposes, and the legs could stand to be a little beefier anyway. So Bill and I decided to slice up some ¾” poplar boards that I had lying around into ¾” square legs, mill round tenons onto the ends of those, and return the dowels for a refund. I modelled up the resulting stands in Fusion 360, and we got design approval from the boss.
The two tall stands were to have 48” long legs, and the 10 shorter ones (shown in the rendering above) were to have 32” legs. A Shopsmith in horizontal-boring mode was the obvious choice of machinery here, so I ordered up a 5/8” CMT plug/tenon cutter bit for about $30.
When the bit arrived, I did a couple of test cuts with it, and found that it was cutting the tenon diameters about 0.005” undersized, and leaving a slightly rough finish on the tenon. Upon close inspection, I found a couple of small machining burrs on the ID that I had missed before. So I polished those off with some fine sandpaper wrapped around a ½” dowel, and honed the front cutting edges with a diamond paddle for good measure.
Voila, my very next test tenon was absolutely beautiful. It fit snugly into my 5/8” Forstner-bit holes, with just a bit of twisting needed to persuade it to slip in. First problem solved.
Now we're getting to the part where things weren’t quite so simple anymore. The tenon lengths for the flower stand legs needed to be precisely controlled, so that the distance between shoulders would be the same for all four legs on each stand. And as the OD’s of the 5/8” tenons were only 1/16” from the faces of the ¾” square legs, the lateral positioning had to be pretty well controlled as well. I forgot to mention that the recommended bit speed for hardwood is only 300 RPM, so I had to leave room for my Shopsmith speed reducer. Bottom line, there was no way to use the rip fence as a backstop.
So a new horizontal boring fixture (end-working fixture, actually) for my Shopsmith was needed. In the next installment, I’ll show you what I came up with.