Completing the Horseshoes

The next step on the horseshoes was to skin the edges with styrene. I used the same technique I used on the legs, attaching the styrene with a 2-part epoxy. I used some clamps and painters tape to hold it in place and worked one section at a time.

Be careful with the end of the styrene strip that isn’t glued down yet, you don’t want to do this…

Fortunately no harm was done in this case. Here is the styrene taped up all the way around. I left the piece long and trimmed it when everything was dry.

I was having a hard time getting the bottoms of the two square holes clean, so I decided to glue in some pieces of styrene to give the bottom of a pocket a clean finish. The other hole was large enough that I was able to get it smooth with some sanding. Here is the complete horseshoe with a couple coats of white spray paint.

Horeshoes Continued

A while back I showed how I made the segments for form the should horseshoes.

The next step in making the horseshoes was to glue these up. Once again I build a jig to help with this process. The jig is composed of a piece of plywood with three 2x2’s screwed to it which forms an area that is exactly the size of the horseshoes. This allowed me to stack the four layers and be sure they were perfectly aligned.

I placed the first layer, and then applied a coating of wood glue to the back of the second layer, stacking it in the jig. I repeated this process with the other two layers. Once this was done I screwed a piece of scrap plywood to the plywood which acted as a clamp.

The next step was to cut the pockets into the surface of the horseshow that will hold the shoulder details. This is the process I used to cut them, but I was not entirely happy with the results I got from this. It required a lot more hand working of the cut outs to get them to look good.

I made these cuts using a router with a straight cutting bit and a guide collar. I made  template out of luan plywood that would guide the router. I didn’t want to screw the template directly to the horse shoe so I screwed some blocks down to my workbench in various positions to firmly hold the part and then screwed the template to one of these blocks. Since this was a deep cut I made multiple passes to make the cut.

It’s been a while since I made these so I can’t remember exactly how I did the square holes. Since there is a small hole in the bottom of each one I may have started the hole using a forstner drill bit and the finished it with the router and template. I did make a template to cut both of the square holes with one template.

Once the router cuts were complete I used a chisel to clean up the corners and did a lot of sanding and patching to clean up the holes.

Leg Skins

In previous posts I showed how I made the layers of the legs. I eventually glued these up to form the structure of the legs. With the legs glued up I decided to skin the edges of the legs with styrene like others have done. With a lot of work I probably could have gotten a smooth surface on the edges, but with the layers of plywood it would tend to crack through the paint, thus the reason for skinning. I decided not to skin the large surfaces of the leg because I felt I could get a nice enough finish without it, but I have seen people who skinned the entire leg.

To start the skinning process I used wood filler to fill any voids in the legs and then sanded everything smooth. I used fairly thin styrene for the skin so I didn’t want any defects in the wood to show through.

I cut a piece of styrene the rough size needed for the bottom portion of the leg. I started with just one side, putting the seam at the very bottom point where it won’t be seen. The piece can be a little bigger the necessary, it can be trimmed afterwards.

To attach the styrene I found the best adhesive was two-part epoxy, I couldn’t find anything else that held as well. I first roughed up the back of the styrene with some sand paper and then coated the wood with a smooth layer of epoxy. Since the epoxy has a fairly short working time I did this in a couple steps. For this part I started with just the side flat area, and then did the angled part as a second step. I taped the styrene in place to keep it from moving while I clamped it.

I firmly clamped it with a piece of plywood between the clamp and the styrene to keep the clamps from damaging the surface. Once that section was dry I moved on to the part that went down the angled part, you can see it sticking out in the picture below.

I used this same process for the rest of the leg. I did the flat side as one piece and cut the groove afterwards. I did a second piece on the slope going up to the shoulder, and the on long piece going all the way around the shoulder. The flats I did with one glue up, but the curve I did little by little so I had  place to clamp it.

Once everything was glued up and dry I trimmed any overhang of the styrene with an X-acto knife and then sanded the edges. There were a few places where the styrene did not adhere completely along the edges so for these I used a toothpick to put in some more epoxy  and taped it down to dry. The epoxy works good for this since any the squeezes out can easily be sanded smooth.

Booster Covers Part 2

In my last post I built the top part of the booster covers, in this one I will show how I made the “leg” portion.

I started by gluing up some pine to make blocks big enough for the legs. This is enough to make four legs, two for each side.,

I cut these to width and height, with the proper top angle, on the table saw.

I cut them to length on the miter saw and then marked where the recessed area needs to be cut out.

I started the cut using the table saw to be sure I got a nice straight cut. When making these sorts of cuts on the table saw, remember that the cut is going to go deeper at the bottom the then top so you need to stop short of the line.

I finished the cuts on the band saw and then did some sanding to clean them up.

The next step was to do the flutes on the bottom of each leg. I did this with a fluting bit in the router table. The marks on the tape indicate the edges of the router bit and were used to set a stop block, seen on the right, to define the end of the cut. In hind sight I probably should have made the flute cuts before make the cut that formed the narrower portion of the piece. With that cut made I could only run the flat side against the fence which required me to do four different setups to get the four flutes. If I could have used either side against the fence I could have done it with just two setups.

Here are the parts with the flutes cut.

The next step was to create the block that connects the two legs together. I made the piece slightly taller then the legs and will sand it to the right height after the pieces have been glued up.

To glue the pieces together I used a second block the same width to keep the legs parallel.

The final step was to cut the groove just above the flutes which I did on the table saw. I did it after the pieces were glued up, although I don’t remember why I didn’t do this before gluing up the pieces.