Shopsmith Forums

Hi,

If anyone watched NBC (6pm) News the other night (though it’s funner to watch HandsOnline), they showed the magnificent Baha’i Temple in Chicago (Wilmette). Info is at http://www.bahai.us/bahai-temple.

This is not my house of worship, but it is personally significant through some of my friends and family.

When I got my SS Bandsaw add-on this year, the first project I did was a model of this 9-sided temple – using the circle-cutting attachment since most pieces have arced edges. See the .jpg attachment. I used Google sketchup to figure out some major proportions by comparing to photos. It was a lot of time spent, and I think I had an experience similar to most woodworkers’ … watching some appeal “disappear” when I put final color paints over the unmatched scrap-wood pieces. But anyway, I saw the model the other day sitting in the more autumn-like angles of the sun, and I liked it again.

(Yes, I felt like Richard Dreyfuss building a mountain-model out of mashed potatoes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.)

FYI, my mom’s friend also found an article showing that some WW2 aircraft-carrier training exercises were done in Lake Michigan, and they used the Baha’i Temple as a visual rendezvous point.


Chris
Shopsmith 510, Bandsaw, and other accessories

Chris- For your first bandsaw project you picked a dandy! I'm impressed with the number of curved (and shaped) pieces that all fit. Although maybe not my choice of projects, you did real good on this one. I can appreciate your inventiveness in first drawing this out on computer - then making it.

I have several questions concerning your methods of sawing and shaping of this challenging project. All of the roof arches are identical. Did you stack the pieces for the roof arches, before sawing? Or make a template and saw them individually? How did you finish the shaping of the inside roof pieces? Did you use a router on the outside edges after sanding? Or sand the roundovers? Either way could offer a challenge.

I also appreciate the columns. Maybe next is a Chess set?

Nice work! I'm interested to see what comes next!

Hi Chuck,

Thanks for your comments and questions. My techniques included:

Outermost roof-arches: I made a cardboard shape template and separately cut 5 pcs of ¾-inch oak stock to that shape on the bandsaw. Then I resawed each one to end up with the necessary 9 thin pieces. Finer smoothing of their profiles was done just using a small drum-sander on the MarkV chuck, and manual sanding as well. For the union of the 9 “peaks” at the summit, I set my work-table to 20 or 40 degrees (I forget now) and slid each piece squarely against the 12” sanding disk. (Now, down the road, I think the OPR would be a great way to do these 9 pieces.) Yep, I even used the Mark V “adjustable stop collar” as a heavy donut to weight them together during gluing.

Inner roof-arcs: This was one that fell into my hands. I had got someone’s “half moon” candle-holder from an antique store, and resawed & cut it into the necessary 9 “quarter moon” pieces. (Below, I’ll mention a round table also from an antique store that just satisfied my needs for other round pieces.)

Pillars: These were some dowel stock originally. I fixtured dowel segments into a sliding worktable vise on the Mark V, and then used a Wagner Safe-T-Plane to apply the “flat portions” to the dowels. Well… the upper set of columns needed more fixing after that, but you get the idea.

“Deck” arc sections: The original architect seems to have been a genius. After a lot of figuring, I was able to take somebody’s cast-away round table (pine) and cut about 350 degrees’ worth of concentric circles on the bandsaw. Then each resulting “ring” I was able to cut into 9 pieces, with carefully-laid-out angles and some deliberate throw-away, so that the 9 pieces could be reversed and joined to produce the decks you see.

The only routing/shaping that I did was on the 9 sides of the MDF base plate. As of yet I’ve put off a real router, and just use the MarkV for my basic needs.

Did I mention I like the Mark V?

Best Regards,
Chris

Shopsmith 510, Bandsaw, and other accessories

Wow! Again - nice work! Goes to show us - Where there is a will - there is a way.

Also - I can't help to recall Nick's words on a recent Sawdust session. Something like, "There is no set method of making a piece".

Thanks for your reply to my questions. This gives us new perspectives on how much thought can go into a relatively small project.

Best Wishes,