Not for candy asses!. The maple board is 1  1/16 " thick and the backer board is 3/4" ash plywood. I should have weighted it for this is the heaviest thing I have ever cut with the scroll saw.

 

I sprayed the stickum on yesterday so I don't have very much time left before the glue stops holding down the pattern for me to cut each piece apart.

This is very hard on my old scroll saw.

Its sitting on the table saw extension for size comparision.

Those two drills are easy to get used to having. Smallest and lightest weight I've ever owned and all this time I wonder why I thought I needed the heaviest drills made.

this morning, inside cutting pieces away from each other. Not much to show for 2 hours of sawing.

Burning marks means change blade.

 

I keep reminding folks when scroll sawing if all you ever use is spiral blades then this inside type of cutting is not for you....especially if the wood thickness is about 2 inches thick. Why? because running spiral blades does not teach a person anything.

 Oh, I'm sorry I do remember seeing a jig built just for the type of straight line sawing I had shown in a picture and I said this type of out in the middle sawing a straight line is a long time learning process where jigs can't be used.. And I still say straight line sawing is the almost impossible task when all a person can use is a regular scroll saw, a regular blade and out in the middle of a board. Show me a 12 x 12" 4 sided box doing it free handed by drawing with a real thin marking pencil and cut out the line as you are sawing.

And leave the spiral blades in the trash.

Edited January 4, 20224 yr by Smallpatch

There you go again, trashing the lowly spirals .  They're just one more tool in the box.  Very nice cutting by the way .

I have a few questions for you though;

What blades are you using?

With a piece that heavy, how do you support the material that hangs off the edge of the saw table?

How big is that monster?

Did you print the pattern in two pieces and tape it together in the middle or ??

Looks like you might want to find a wall stud to hang this one on Jess

25" cross ways and very hard to fit under the 788 which is 22" capacity

Wichman3 I'm glad you came back so I can answer your questions. I'm in no way picking on you and like you said its the dang spirals. I say if you don't shuck the spirals and stick to learning the regular blades then you are missing out on things like this.

The first thing I do when starting this project is to cover the entire slab of maple with Scotch brand packing tape.

   I have lots of small pieces of patterns for this puzzle to lay in exact areas so the wood gets lots of pencil marks to let me know where each piece goes...

  Like I said the packing tape goes over all the wood then I spray Scotch brand spray glue over all the tape and

make sure there is plenty of stickum every where..I have lots of hours ahead of me to get all the scroll sawing done so I don't want anything to move around or part of the patterns to come off...I find the cheaper tape does leave sticky spots all over the wood and to get the sticky off I use lacquer thinner, which is the fastest, Scotch brand works better without having to find some to remove the sticky.

  I pulled all the tape off of the interior as soon as I finished the sawing.  This picture shows all the interior with the tape removed. I have so many pieces of this picture I don't want any pieces lost so I keep them in their slots until I need one to carve. I also need to learn where each piece goes of else it would be like a new puzzle to put together

  Before I started scroll sawing I attached a backer board to this piece of maple with counter sinking a few sheet metal screws to hold the backer board to the hunk of maple only in the interior where no scroll sawing would be later. Then as I started sawing the outside from the waste wood after a few inches sawing I will stop and pre drill a few holes and insert more screws. To me this procedure is very important for all the pieces of wood they will go back exactly where they started  before I start cutting them ,one piece at a time and then will have an exact place to return them to.  I mostly concentrate on all the outside pieces having screws to keep them in place and since some of the interior are too thin to have screws.

   I don't get any wood cracking out from screws for I use a drill bit that is say .010 smaller than the width of the screw. Only the area of the outside of the threads should go in to the wood and not bulging where the wood swells out until it bust.

   Wichman the original picture I found I liked and decided to carve was the two pictures laying on each side of of what I'm working on now.

 

You say I sprayed stickup over the entire maple block of wood. Yes and then laid pieces of patterns in marked areas. And in some place nothing but to cover the sticky up I laid paper hand towels over the sticky areas. 

 Some of the interior pieces  have no screws holding them in place for they are so thin that the screws are wider that the wood but since the outside edges are important to keep the pieces , they all have screws in place and only the glue that I flood in as I am placing the pieces will keep the picture all together.

 

I added some to the tops of both pictures so the carving would almost reach completely around the movement and some added down in the middle on the bottom.

 With this Rapid Resizer app or program you can find a picture on Pinterest or any where and click on that picture and make it to biggest it will go then save it to Rapid Resizer for later use..Then when ready to use any of the pictures you saved, bring up Resizer and print out what size you need.. 

 Oh yes you do need a printer for all this but Walmart has some great prices on printers. This last one I bought to sit here for my carving stuff cost 20.00 plus tax. No need going ape on prices for Rapid Resizer does all the enlarging and reducing and also if you can only find one picture and want it for things like I make resizer has a button that says flip and that easy gets the other side printed real quick.

This printer is MG 2522 it is a Canon

 

 

 I had found one side of this thing in a book somewhere and had my Rapid Resizer flip it and then enlarged both sides to use for this project. But did have to make the carving longer by adding more carving so it would go all the way up past the movement. 

  

Another thing on learning to keep the blade exactly straight up and down especially while turning real sharp turns is practice practice practice and when one needs to remove these pieces to carve they need to come out in one piece no matter if they are large or small...

  I haven't tried making carvings using a spiral but by measuring the width of a blade don't leave a nice tight area between pieces so it will look like one giant piece of carving.

 

I'm sorry I'm trying to make you see why not getting all the experience possible with using a regular blade is so important if you ever decide you want to expand you ability  keeping a scroll saw under control at all times.

  Maybe a good comparison is learning to water ski but not never coming up out of the water to go across the lake on the ski's. Going slow and staying down in the water I can see a person until they shuck the spirals..

 

 Blades I use. For cutting the outside away from the picture I use an Olsen # 5 presision ground blade. Cuts faster and last longer before getting dull and all the inside cutting was with a Flying Dutchman #5 FDU series. It lets me stay more accurate by maybe not cutting as fast so it does last longer with less breaking.

 

I have used a spiral about 5 minutes and they will not advance you skill at all when its needs to be perfect.. so in my mind folks give in instead of.

 

 

Now that I have the pieces small enough to hold in my hands I now can sit down and use these three Dremels to do lots of the carving..I do use other grinders but don't own any hand held carving knives. 2 x 42 x 1" belt , disk sander. a 9 inch oscillating drum sander. And a few air grinders.

 

I like to leave to patterns on the carving pieces so I can start the grinding like it is supposed to be.

 

Notice how there is big elevation changes in short distances so that means lots of grinding have to take lot of wood off to like the same.

 

 

 

Jess,  I've been scrolling since '85. I didn't use spirals for the first 30 years of scrolling, I agree that beginners should stick to flat blades and develop their skills before using spirals.

That being said, how do you support the wood that's hanging off the edge of your scroll saw table?

 

Raw strength. It was always on my make a jig for it list of things to build. Now I just use Johnson's Paste wax on the top and this really helps..and then after I got my shoulder operated on was there at the top of the list again. I can weld up a bolt on table all the way around but I just keep starting a new carving project as fast as I can right after I take one in to the house..My mom told me I got my first scroll saw, then called a jig saw from Sears right after WW11  some times in 46. And I recall the blade hooked in and just viberated and did not move up and down. I could put my finger against the blade slow and it would not cut in to my skin. Mother saved all the things I made in my younger years and I still have the very first thing I made with the saw, a corner shelf looking of a sea horse or I should say 2 sea horses with one little shelf to hold them together. Its about 12 inches tall. Later in life I always wondered where we got the wood since they said everything was hard to come by that close to the end of the war. The shelf still says Nails on the under side with the size of nails imprinted in the wood. She said I bugged the lumber yard in to some free wood for that project!

I started carving first piece just to see how much the center section with the bare wood showing needs to be ground down.

 

The more I grind the center section down the more the carving will show up. I will slop the wood around the carving so the gap will come together about 1/4" down  making it look like there is no gap between the carving pieces and the slab or the center hunk of wood.

 

I think a real wood carver would only lower the bare wood 3 or 4 inches out from the carving pieces which would be way less labor involved but I can lift out the carving pieces and use a wide planer and after I measured the width of my planer and the wood is 1 inch too wide  so I started using the hand held belt sander with 80 grit belt  and its removing the wood fast enough.

  This next shot is where only the carving has been worked on and the center section has not been touched yet.

 There is a good reason I like to use hard maple in me carving, hardly any fuzzies

 

I original planned on 4 instruments being in the middle of this thing and still hope I can do something spectacular to it to give folks that wow feeling but wow I got a long way to go before that might happen.

   You can see how the bottom end of the carving piece is only about 3/8" thick and the top is still about the original thickness which is about 1 1/16" so some of the wood will be lowered more than other parts. I actually went to extremes on lowering one end so this is my measuring gauge for the rest of this project.

 Also when you are working with this many small pieces its real easy to misplace a few and making another piece takes too much wasted time so each night for sure I put the puzzle back like it will end being and it also lets me learn when all these pieces go . Did I mention there are 49 pieces to this thing. I also learned when I sweep the floor and put the things in a safe place until the puzzle is glued up and the finish is sprayed on. 

 

One needs a good memory and not an old one like mine to work this type of mess.

1 hour ago, Smallpatch said:

One needs a good memory and not an old one like mine to work this type of mess.

Well if this is the rules, I'm out. Speaking of out, I don't remember what it was I'm out of...oh wait, my mind maybe??

Dave, I like your man thingy.

You don't think you might have opened a can of worms do you?

56 minutes ago, Smallpatch said:

Dave, I like your man thingy.

You don't think you might have opened a can of worms do you?

...I don't think we should talk about that here

I'll pretend I never saw it.

 

I got the insides lowered today. I also had to do some filling for I tried to make the first piece of carving in to 3D but had to fill out the bottom with glue and titebond 111 so I could start over again.

  I been waiting all day for the doctor to call us back. He must be sick also.

2 minutes ago, Smallpatch said:

I been waiting all day for the doctor to call us back. He must be sick also.

Prayers for all to be OK Patch!