The secret bridge

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

Some ideas come hard

The Boughen boys are busy again with the trim in the new house and making great progress. This means I have to keep busy designing and creating the custom trim pieces they will install.

One of the key pieces are to form the decorative surfaces on the bridge over the dining/living room areas. Through the last six months we've been working hard to come up with a design. I've filled dozens of pages in my sketchbooks with ideas but none satisfied us until I finally hit on a dfferent version last evening. At last we had a design that worked! Today I worked on the final revisions of the design and tomorrow I should finish the routing version of the file. It will feature a butterfly background similar to the window trim on the windows.

The design above shows the basic design. As usual we will include a bunch of surprises and details that will take it over the top. Stay tuned...

-grampa dan

Fancy that!

Today I started routing the fancy curved crown moldings that will top the giant round windows in the dining room and living room of the new house. Too large to be built in one piece, they will instead be routed in sections and then assembled in place up high on the wall. The tape measure sitting beside the moldings help give a getter idea of the scale of the pieces.

I can hardly wait to see them up in place, giving form at last to ideas dreamed of and sketched long, long ago. Stay tuned...

-grampa dan