Ripplemania III, Part Deux

As our recent week of Ripplemania III proceeded we were both making progress, albeit not entirely unhampered by glitches along the way.  John was very much involved in locking in his wave function (side-to-side) while I was dialing in my new swing-arm cutting head for narrow-ish ripple moldings.

Once I got the free weight on the pivoting head right it started producing some very nice moldings.  The anvil weighed just the right amount and I could slide it back and forth to adjust the force on the cutting tool, heavy for the initial cuts then lighter for the finishing cuts.

I also wanted to standardize the workpiece-holding aspect of the platen and spent some time making new clamps from a piece of aluminum angle stock,  This approach worked extremely well.

Another thing we did during the week was gather all the tool steel I had in my inventory to begin the work on making new cutters.  I had already ordered a variety of tool steel bars over the years for one project or another, when combined with the “used” tool steel I also had resulted in quite a pile.  Since I never throw away old planer blades there were a number of them, but the real treasure was the stack of hefty blades (~1/2″ thick) from a book producer’s guillotine that my pal Tom passed along to me.  These massive chinks will yield a large number of cutters, probably more than I will ever need.  I spent several hours working on a new cutter pattern for my machine but did not get that blade finished during the week.

Even before this week of prototyping John’s machine had ripple molding cutting nailed.  So, he pretty much spent the week trying to do the same for the wave molding cutting function.

In working through the problems of wave molding cutting John kept running into the hurdles caused by the elegantly complex head he had created for his machine, one that could do either wave or ripple moldings, and ideally even both simultaneously.  This was a really complex problem that expressed itself in a number of hiccups due to the lateral forces being exerted at the cutting edge.  He definitely made progress but the problem of the lateral forces and their effect on the cutter-head were not fully solved.

My issues were much simpler, just get a cutter head and workpiece holding system suitable for scratching out a simple  pattern.  One of the things I decided almost immediately was that my machine was too low to the ground, especially when cranking the handle to drive the moving platen, so I just hoisted it onto a pair of low sawhorse.  That helped my attitude immensely.