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Hi everyone. I have a few projects I would like to complete and am looking for advice on the easiest way to do them. I would like to make a picture frame and a wooden box with no top to store odds and ins.

For the picture frame, I want to use two different boards, glued together. For the large board, rout the length of a board equal to the desired perimeter (plus a little extra) with an ornamental shape. Then, cut 45 degree miter joints to length. Use a chamfer bit to round the edge of a small board of the corresponding inner perimeter. Then cut the thinner board with 45 degree cuts. Put the outer portion together with glue. Glue the thin board together as an inner perimeter, flush with the ornamentally shaped large board. I was thinking pine because I am very likely to screw up the routing and have some tear out and want to be able to start over or scrap a piece and not cry.

For the box, I want to use poplar. I know some people think the grey-green color is ugly, but I actually like it. The board is ¾ inch thick. The bottom is 1/8 inch plywood. It needs to be roughly 8 x 5 x 5 (L x W x H). Make a 1/8-inch deep groove cut the length of the perimeter on the bottom of the board (with a little extra). Rip and cross cut the board to make the sides. Cut a basic rabbet joint on the edges of the board by cutting 3/8 inch both directions on both ends of all four sides (double corner rabbet joint). Cut the plywood to fit. Put the rabbet joints on the edges together with the plywood in the bottom groove. Glue together.

Are these reasonable plans?

Many thanks,
Karl

kas20amc02 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 15, 2025 10:56 pm Hi everyone. I have a few projects I would like to complete and am looking for advice on the easiest way to do them. I would like to make a picture frame and a wooden box with no top to store odds and ins.

For the picture frame, I want to use two different boards, glued together. For the large board, rout the length of a board equal to the desired perimeter (plus a little extra) with an ornamental shape. Then, cut 45 degree miter joints to length. Use a chamfer bit to round the edge of a small board of the corresponding inner perimeter. Then cut the thinner board with 45 degree cuts. Put the outer portion together with glue. Glue the thin board together as an inner perimeter, flush with the ornamentally shaped large board. I was thinking pine because I am very likely to screw up the routing and have some tear out and want to be able to start over or scrap a piece and not cry.

For the box, I want to use poplar. I know some people think the grey-green color is ugly, but I actually like it. The board is ¾ inch thick. The bottom is 1/8 inch plywood. It needs to be roughly 8 x 5 x 5 (L x W x H). Make a 1/8-inch deep groove cut the length of the perimeter on the bottom of the board (with a little extra). Rip and cross cut the board to make the sides. Cut a basic rabbet joint on the edges of the board by cutting 3/8 inch both directions on both ends of all four sides (double corner rabbet joint). Cut the plywood to fit. Put the rabbet joints on the edges together with the plywood in the bottom groove. Glue together.

Are these reasonable plans?

Many thanks,
Karl

Karl,

I'll give my advice, but I hope others chime in here as well. Picture frames can be tricky because any imperfection will easily show in the mitered corners. One might chase getting a perfect 45°, but the alternative is to have miter joints that compensate each other, e.g. one side could be 44° and the other could be 46° and no one would ever know because you would have a seamless line as they mate together. This comes down to how you arrange your cuts and the tool used to do it. Shopsmith makes an accessory for this called the Shopsmith Miter Pro and Scott has a good video on it which I will link below. Some of us, like me, find the standard miter gauge from Shopsmith to be less precise than our desires. In fact, I don't even do cross cuts on my 520 anymore. I have a Porter Cable miter saw and prefer to do cross cuts on it, but I still use my 520 to do rip cuts, as a lathe and drill press and etc. One option for doing perfect miters is to buy the Shopsmith Miter Pro, but you could also buy or make a crosscut sled which would help greatly for making picture frames. One caution though is to understand that most tablesaws on the market have a miter gauge slot that is 3/4" wide by 1/4" tall. Shopsmith has a non-standard miter gauge slot in its main table. It is 3/16" thick/tall by 23/32" wide. This complicates trying to use any 3rd party miter gauge accessories with Shopsmith equipment because they are too large to fit. You either have to buy a Shopsmith product or but the special size miter bars from Shopsmith and make your own crosscut sled.

On wood choice, pick what you like and what you can afford. For years, I built projects where I either tried to let the natural color of the wood shine, i.e. clear coat, or I applied stain. For example, the dining table and china cabinet that I built for my wife in college, I bought Red Oak because I could afford that. However, I wanted more of a deep red mahogany color. I was young and inexperienced so I bought two different color stains and I blended them until I found the ratio that gave me the color I truly wanted. Three decades later this furniture is still in use by us and looks just as good today as when I first built it. Fast forward to a few years ago. I built a really beefy computer desk for my son. He is into gaming as a hobby and his desktop computer is large, heavy and a display piece, i.e. most gamers put their computer up on top of their desks so they can see the pretty lights on display. So, I built a large desk out of 8/4 cherry (2" thick desktop) for him. It is like a tank, but that is important because desktop bounce and vibrations are not conducive to a spirited round of gameplay as it could affect gaming performance. Again I wanted a deep mahogany color for this cherry desk, but this time more brown with hints of red throughout. So, I got to experiment and learn how to age cherry to get the desired color and patina I was going for. For me, after three decades of woodworking, I wanted to try new things as I got to do on this desk project. Next, I wanted to build him a bookcase to match the desk for his bedroom, but my time was needed elsewhere after the desk project so I hesitantly accepted my wife purchasing a bookcase. Unfortunately his room is small so only a 24" wide bookcase would work in the room. Only pine bookcases are available in the marketplace for a 24" wide bookcase. Only 30", 36" or wider bookcases are available to purchase in woods other than pine. It was cheap, but it fit the need for my son. This time, I chose to learn how to work with dyes. You can either leave your woodworking project bare, i.e. natural finish, or you can paint it ( ), or you can stain it or you can dye it. I had never worked with dyes before. Stain was comfortably in my wheelhouse, but I found a recipe online that I thought would give me that brown mahogany kind of color on pine wood using dyes...one I would tweak to match his desk with a little bit of red in it. It took some trial and error, but I found a solution that nicely matched this pine bookcase to his cherry desk. Both altered though wood finish to appear more like a deep mahogany finish (medium->dark brown with red highlights). It turned out much better than I anticipated and I got to learn something new. Okay, sorry for the long post, but I hope this helps. Whether it is pine or poplar or something else, the bottomline is do you like it? If you do great, but if you don't, you can always shift the color palette a bit to create something beautiful that you will love. All the furniture stores sell products where they often use pine or poplar or whatever less expensive wood is available locally, but then they stain/dye it to be the wood color the customer wants. Some high end furniture companies do this so well that the finished product is indistinguishable from the wood it is meant to look like.

kas20amc02 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 15, 2025 10:56 pm Are these reasonable plans?

Miters can be challenging. Table alignment should be as good as you can get it, paying particular attention to tilt. This is true whether you use a miter gauge, Miter Pro, sled, or other jig. Compound angles are fine for compound miter joints, but not for flat miters. I'm not a 510 guy, but on my 520 I always connect the main and auxiliary tables together with connecting tubes when I want stability, as in this case. Equality of opposing board lengths is as important as cutting the perfect 45's. If I'm not satisfied with my miters for any reason, I sneak up on the appearance of perfection using the sanding disc and miter gauge.

If you don't have one, consider adding a router table with a fence to your arsenal. Or explain (with pictures?) what kind of router problems you are having, maybe we have some suggestions. Ideally your router experience should not dictate your choice of material!

- David

Thanks for the ideas.

I have never routed anything until this year. I found that you can quickly make a mess with a router than can be difficult to cover up. Whether that be tear out or a burr, letting the base or guide off the supporting structure for a moment can mar your work.

Here is the sundial I made. You can see mistakes on the far R line (5 PM mark) and the Ogee bit used on the edge. I used a homemade jig for these parrallel lines.

I had similar problems with routing a flat bottom on these game tile racks. The bottom of the U shape had divots and burrs from either the unevenness of the stock and/or letting the router off a support for a fraction of a second. I used the Bosch router guide for this project. I do not have a router table. I think an upcut or downcut bit may have helped make it smoother.

Thanks again
KaS

Tell me about hat linear sun dial.

Karl,

For the straight lines are you using a straight cut trim bit or a spiral cut bit? A spiral bit will help some at reducing tearout. Also, for doing this type of cut, you can use blue masking tape to minimize tearout. An alternative is to use a sharp marking knife and score the cut lines, before routing, so that the wood fibers at the surface don't tearout like that. One important point with router operations is to understand feed direction. I have included a video below from Stumpy, but there are many others online. Stumpy just has good graphics to explain this. Also for the line cuts, not always so easy to do, but you are making cuts across the grain and the board you show has nice straight grain. If you could have made those cuts with the grain by rotating your setup 90°, you would probably have had very little tearout as the long vertical cuts would have been in the same orientation with the grain lines. You can't always do this, but for a project like this where you are making straight lines, IF you can orient those lines to the grain direction then tearout would have been naturally minimized. Overall, the project still looks good...look at it this way, the minor imperfections give it character.

Regarding linear sun dials (best used near the equator - also must be re-calibrated when used on other planets - don't even attempt in a binary star system ):

https://lyncean.education/projects/astr ... -sundials/

Excerpt:
"For latitudes near the Equator, a “polar” design is much better. In this design, you make the plate and the style parallel to each other, and you tilt both of them. This makes the design very long and thin and suitable for tracking the overhead path of the sun at the equator. (At the poles, the circular “clock-face” design is best. At the Equator, the linear “polar” design is best. In between, you get to choose.) Here's a paper polar sundial designed for 30° latitude:"

Karl,

There is usually a lot more activity on this forum, but we seem to be in a lull right now. I can only speak for the past 5 years or so that I have been a forum member, but historically sometimes activity dips on the forum but then it comes back again later. I say all of this because I guided you to pose your questions on the forum and I hope all of them get answered. When activity is lower on the forum, it may take some time before forum members chime in. IF your questions aren't getting answered, I will tell you that some Shopsmith owners spend more/all of their time on the Shopsmith group on Facebook. I don't like FB, or most social media, but I just want to point out that it is there if want to explore. Also, Scott has produced some really good content that is Shopsmith focused on YouTube, but he also has his own site at https://www.mygrowthrings.com/. It is a pay site, but some Shopsmith owners have gravitated to that site as well. I hope you stay and participate on this forum which Shopsmith freely makes available to Shopsmith owners or anyone online that wants to contribute, but I just wanted to point out to you that forum activity sometimes take a dip as forum members are busy in their shops or for other personal reasons. It usually picks back up after a brief time though. Just want you to get answers to your woodworking questions.

Karl,

I don't know if I can add that much that RFGuy hasn't already covered. Scott's video he posted shows using the Shopsmith Miter Pro which looks like a great jig for that work. I don't have one yet so only going by the video. I did cringe every time Scott moved his hands around the running saw blade.

Routing can be a challenge with only a portable Router. You can do routing on the Shopsmith Mark tools but due to the much slower speed, even with a Speed Increaser or the Power Pro Headstock, you have to feed the stock much slower. I have done some limited routing on a Mark V. You could try building yourself a Router Table or purchase one to put your Router in for better results.

As for cutting Miters all I can say is check and recheck the Alignments.

Thanks for the advice.

This is indeed a polar sundial. I will not bore you with all the astronomical details, but the gist is that the face is at 34.5 degrees (my latitude) and the lines are spaced in relation to the height of the gnomon (the aluminum blade in the center). There are many types of sundials that all have advantages and disadvanatages.

I used a cheap straight bit to make the lines and I now know (in hindsight) that an upcut bit would have been a better choice. I understand cutting across the grain is less than ideal as well. I did not know about the tape strategy but might try that in the future.

My sundial is very accurate for what it is, as you can see from the picture with time stamps that I posted. Overall, I was very pleased with it for a first effort. I thought of other ideas on how to make it even better, with a dial for times near noon and a second dial for morning/afternoon times on the same device. Geometry prohibits making it accurate for all times with one device and it can never measure earlier than 5:30 AM or later than 5:30 PM.

I digress. Thanks for the woodworking tips and ideas.

RFGuy wrote: ↑Tue Jun 17, 2025 7:16 am Regarding linear sun dials (best used near the equator - also must be re-calibrated when used on other planets - don't even attempt in a binary star system ):

https://lyncean.education/projects/astr ... -sundials/

Excerpt:
"For latitudes near the Equator, a “polar” design is much better. In this design, you make the plate and the style parallel to each other, and you tilt both of them. This makes the design very long and thin and suitable for tracking the overhead path of the sun at the equator. (At the poles, the circular “clock-face” design is best. At the Equator, the linear “polar” design is best. In between, you get to choose.) Here's a paper polar sundial designed for 30° latitude:"
linear_sundial.jpg