Well, here I am working on building up a craft business, and I've decided that I need more products than just my banks.Now, don't get me wrong- I feel strongly that I build the best post office box banks around, and I'm not about to stop making them.
I've observed, though, that I need to have smaller, less expensive items to offer in order to keep the cash flowing.
To that end, I've been working on ideas for various items that I can produce quickly, and sell at a reasonable price. This is going to require that I be able to reproduce these items quickly and easily.
I've looked at different ways to accomplish this. While, ultimately, it's my intention to build a CNC router, at the moment that is beyond my means.
I thought about using templates with a router, but this still seemed too slow. Then, one evening I was looking through some old magazines in my shop and happened upon an article on building a pantograph for a router (Popular Science, Oct. 1970).
The author of the article, James Joyner, had not only come up with a practical and simple pantograph, he had also come up with a good system of making and using templates. His focus had been cutting lettering- while I may well do some of that, I have other intentions for designs. The beauty of this system is it's versatility.
So, once I decided to build this system, the first thing I had to do was round up the materials. Just for fun, I decided to build it using whatever junk I had in my car (plus bits from the shop). Of course, since I knew what I had collected in my car at the time, this was an easy decision...
So, what do I have to work with here-
1- A pile of various scraps of solid surface material- didn't come into this project, but I'll use them to make plenty of other items.
2- Some shallow drawers, made of 1/2" birch ply (sides), and 1/4" ply (bottoms). There were two of the small ones- I've already used one to make a small downdraft table for sanding. The wierd looking item in the top one is a cell phone display- I got a bunch of them from a cell phone store. Still not sure what use it will be.
3. A pile of wood- a nice big piece of 3/4" birch ply (no idea why the target was drawn on it- it had no random holes in it), a small pile of oak lumber, a bit of 1/2 birch ply, and a nice pine board. Here is where my pantograph materials will come from.
4. Not really sure what I'll be able to use this last bit for- it is a piece of 1" thick marble, about four feet long. I don't have tools to cut it- maybe I can trade it to someone for something else. Or, possibly, just break it into lengths with a hammer and chisel and use it for weights.
In amongst all of this is a little plastic bag containing the hardware I bought just for this project. More on that later.
To keep things simple and light, I'm planning to use a trim router with this rig. I don't really care for the trim router I have, but it's the one I've got- and I got it by trading some of my labor, so the price was right. Ideally, I'd like to use a plunge router, but apparently there isn't a small one on the market anymore. The bit of 1/2" birch ply that I had in the car is ideal for the router base- here I've begun laying it out.
No plan- just figuring it out as I go
And here's the completed layout. Some people would make this an exercise in complexity- me, I used handy roll of masking tape to lay out the curves at the corners.
Here's the base, cut to rough shape. I'm planning to make clamps to hold the router in place, in case I find one that I like better. To that end, I've counterbored the bottom, and epoxied in some threaded inserts (found them in a coffee can in the shop). This is all going to get covered with
some laminate (that I had in the shop for another project that remains unfinished), and then cut to final shape on the scroll saw.
The original article called for oak arms, 1/2" thick by 1" wide. I thought about using plywood, but decided that oak actually was the better material for this project. I am changing the dimensions a bit though- the author used brass wood screws for his pivots. My plan is to use 1/4 hex bolts, passing through nylon bushings. The bushings are 1/2 in diameter- if I went with 1" wide arms, this wouldn't leave me very much stock around them, so I decided to go with 1/2" by 1 1/4" for the arms.
Here, I've ripped the arms to 1 1/4", and I've flipped them up on edge to resaw them to 1/2" thick. This could be done with the bandsaw and planer, but a good ripping blade makes it much easier and faster to do this on the table saw. If I were concerned about appearance, I'd cut them just a little proud of 1/2" and run them through the planer, but that's not needed here. The piece in the foreground has already been cut to size.
The arm which carries the router consists of the router base, with two shorter arms attached to it, with the router riding in the middle. The next two pictures show the glue-up of this assembly. I've lined up the short arms to get the proper spacing, clamped them to a scrap piece to keep them straight, then glued them to the base. Wax paper keeps the alignment scrap from being glued. After the glue was dry, I drilled and countersunk from the bottom, and installed three screws on each side.
Here the arms are cut to size, and screwed together in order to be sure that all of the holes are drilled at precisely the same distances.
Note the layout lines.
And here they are with the holes drilled- note the layout for the end on the second one down. No measuring or complex layout here- I just freehand a curve with a pencil, then used the bandsaw and belt sander to get it to the shape I liked. The first one was used to lay out all the others. If I were making a bunch of these, I'd make a template complete with positioning blocks, but it's not worth the trouble here.
The paper above is one page of the two page article- the magazine was literally falling apart.
Here's the hardware I purchased especially for this project- a few hex head bolts, a bunch of fender washers, nylon lock screws, and some nylon spacers. I saved a bit of money by buying the spacers longer than I needed and cutting them to length. The bolts are longer than actually needed as I didn't want threads inside the bushings- I can cut off any excess length if I decide to later. The one longer bolt will go through the base. Total cost for all of this? $3.98 (including sales tax)! And that was my entire cost for this project!
And here we have it assembled for the first time- it's starting to look like something, finally!
A pantograph needs a base to work on, and here I'm putting it's base/table together. It's simply some red oak runners screwed to the edges. The ply board is wider than my workbench, so the runners will hang over the sides. In use, I'll clamp one of them in my workbench vise, keeping everything nice and steady. The "target" is visually distracting, so I put it on the bottom. I used the board as it was, no cutting at all.
The pivoting base for the pantograph is hinged to allow moving the router without cutting into the workpiece. The base itself is simply a bit of red oak counterbored for a hex bolt. The stylish hinges came out of a box of old cabinet hardware I picked up at an auction years ago.
As you can imagine, at this point I was eager to try this thing out. Even though I haven't made the clamps yet, I went ahead and screwed the router to it's base, and installed a 3/16" flat bit. I grabbed a couple of pieces of scrap ply, and used a magic marker to lay out my initials on one of them.
After cutting out the letters on the scroll saw, I screwed the template and a piece of 1/2" birch ply to the board, and cut my initials. It worked perfectly! This pantograph is designed to be a 1:2 ratio, so it cuts about half the size of the template. This ratio will actually make it easier to make good templates.
The follower is simply a hex bolt with the head cut off and the end smoothed a bit. I'll attach a handle here later.
All in all, I'm going to have to proclaim this a very successful project! It didn't cost much, was easy to build, and should end up helping me make lots of money! The only drawback I can see to this machine is the 1:2 ratio- I can see that I might want a 1:1 ratio for some items. I've got a plan for this, though- back in the mid '90's Wood magazine published a plan for such a pantograph. I'm thinking that I want to build one after their design (with appropriate modifications- they made using the thing entirely too much work!).
So, keep an eye on this space to see my next pantograph!
