Altar Build: Break Down

 

Probably the second worst job of any large furniture build that involves sheet goods is breaking large sheets into smaller pieces. (The worst job will always be sanding and it's not even close to second.) The sheets are heavy and my accurate tools like the tablesaw with a nice sharp blade on it, are too small. So I have to cut them into pieces small enough that my table saw can handle the rest. 

To break down a sheet, I slide it up onto my workbench and slide some scrap pieces of wood underneath so that I don't cut into my workbench table top by accident. Then I measure out a rough distance giving me some room to play with. The tool you see above is called a track saw. The saw itself slides on a grooved aluminum plate that makes it cut a perfectly straight line, in what ever orientation you position it in. But the blade in the saw isn't meant for fine carpentry so I cut it oversized so that I can do the final trimming later.

Once I had the sheets broken down into smaller pieces, I moved around my table saw and rolling workbench, designed to be at a specific height as you can see, and started preparing to cut everything into final widths. The table saw fence and higher quality blade along for smoother cuts and making them parallel to the opposite side which is key to keeping everything square. With each piece, I would first cut off a tiny slice off one side with my better blade and then flip the piece over and cut the other side to the final dimension. I am left with two nicely cut sides that are parallel to each other on all the pieces.

My table saw is still too small to cut the boards in the longer dimension. All the pieces you see above are going to form the "carcass" of the build or the box shape that the table top will rest on and ornamentation will attach too. So my plan is to get everything assembled, and then use my track saw to trim everything to it's final length. As discussed above, the track saw doesn't leave the smoothest cut but that entire edge that I trim to length will be hidden under trim work that I add later so it shouldn't matter. What matters most at that point, is to get everything nice and straight so the top rests on it nice and for that, the track saw is well suited.

Below are all the pieces for the carcass assembly cut out to final widths and labeled so that I don't get things mixed up. Next up, I have to make the panel with the double ogee arch detail before I glue it to all the other panels because it is easier to cut it when there isn't something behind it. This will make more sense in a future post.