The long awaited 'secret' bridge to Phoebe's 'secret' room is now in production at last.

Each piece of trim in the house needs to go up in a particular order. I'm trying to make the job as simple as possible, batching the production of the custom moldings if I can. But that isn't always possible when I need to jump around to keep up to the finish carpenters. The bridge faces are the next item on the rush list. Just for fun we are arching the bridge deck up slightly. This means we will frame up the arch on top and then install the flooring over the hump. The bridge railings will also follow the curve.

It took me a few hours to build the file digitally which I then sent to the CNC (computerised) router. It will take up to fifteen hours to route each half (of each side) of the bridge face but the machine can do it more than five times faster than I could do it by hand.

With a design finally in hand the first test piece is now on the table and by Monday morning we should have one side of the bridge ready for the install. The router cuts the file in three passes. The first is a rough cut, hogging out the deeper areas with a 3/8" dimeter bit. Then we use a 1/8" bit to do a detailed pass. This shot is of the small bit as it starts the file. Lastly we instruct the machine to do a cut out pass around the edge of the piece. This happens in minutes.

While the MultiCam CNC router runs I keep busy on other things... including designing the next file we are in a rush for. :)

-grampa dan