On Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at 10:57:04 PM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote:
On Tue, 2 Apr 2019 19:43:19 -0700 (PDT), Greg Guarino
wrote:

On Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at 1:39:34 PM UTC-4, Leon wrote:
On 4/2/2019 9:36 AM, Greg Guarino wrote:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdguar...n/photostream/

It will be 34.5" long, with a 32" radius according to Sketchup. I imagine some of you might do it with a band saw and a spindle sander, but that's not an option for me.

I have done pattern routing in the past, with success. But I wonder if with this large a curve it might be easier to whip up a jig with a pivot point 34" from the router bit. I would of course roughly cut out the shape with a sabre saw before routing in either case.

Advice?


I have a piece of plywood that I attach my router on to and I pivot the
router and plywood piece as you are mentioning. Just make the cut in
3~4 passes.

When I have a ellipse type arc I print the ark at full scale on
Sketchup, tape the pieces together, glue the drawing to the board and
cut out with either a band saw or jig saw. Then smooth with a spindle
sander.

In my case, I will definitely be using a router. I doubt that I could approach the accuracy I'll get with a router with any other method that is currently available to me. The question is should I make a template or make myself a circle jig.

The template I certainly know how to do. I was curious to see if anyone here used a "jig" - as you mention, just a piece of ply with a couple of holes in it. I may give that a shot. Do I understand you correctly that you do not even cut out the curve roughly beforehand? You make the entire cut with the router, getting deeper with each pass? I do have a plunge router, but I had not considered that.

If you can make a template then why not just cut the curve the same
way you would have cut the template?

You have a point, I guess. When I have done this before I was making multiple identical pieces. I still think I could "fair" a 1/4" MDF template to the curve more easily than 3/4" oak though.

Personally if I didn't have the tools I have, I'd make a spline, use
it to draw the curve, rough it out with a jigsaw (or coping saw if I
didn't have a jigsaw), and smooth it down with a sanding spline. This
isn't one of those deals where you have to have absolute precision, as
long as it's a smooth curve nobody's going to notice if it isn't a
perfect arc of a circle.