Today I had a little time to work on the second iteration of the pickup rings. First I sanded the wenge top flat. The glue line disappeared nicely.
Then I built a routing template from some plywood and treated the edges with superglue. I used the template to scribe the outlines on the pickup ring blank.
I then forstnered and chiseled the excess out and routed the rest. I used the 6 mm flush trim bit on the trim router held in a mini router table / eccentric base on a vise. It required a firm grip and shallow passes but worked nicely.
I did a test fit and was quite pleased. The corner radius was a hair off, but otherwise the fit was great.
I then filed a little give on the bottom for the outward curvature on the bottom of the pickup cover. Which was mostly useless, since a lot of it will be routed off later on...
The outside edges I did on the table saw with the crosscut sled. First most of the excess, then separated the two, then brought them to size little by little. This works okay and results are clean.
It might not be the safest way to do this. If I were to batch these out I'd put some guides and workholding in there. But for one pair this worked fine.
At this stage these are a lot better than the first batch. The fit on the cover is clean and there were no splintering issues.
Then I built a routing template from some plywood and treated the edges with superglue. I used the template to scribe the outlines on the pickup ring blank.
I then forstnered and chiseled the excess out and routed the rest. I used the 6 mm flush trim bit on the trim router held in a mini router table / eccentric base on a vise. It required a firm grip and shallow passes but worked nicely.
I did a test fit and was quite pleased. The corner radius was a hair off, but otherwise the fit was great.
I then filed a little give on the bottom for the outward curvature on the bottom of the pickup cover. Which was mostly useless, since a lot of it will be routed off later on...
The outside edges I did on the table saw with the crosscut sled. First most of the excess, then separated the two, then brought them to size little by little. This works okay and results are clean.
It might not be the safest way to do this. If I were to batch these out I'd put some guides and workholding in there. But for one pair this worked fine.
At this stage these are a lot better than the first batch. The fit on the cover is clean and there were no splintering issues.
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