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My Room Box


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Welcome to the forum.  This is quite an ambitious first project!  I really like your stairs that you made, but no milling machines around here for me; I need to get a new set of local friends with milling machines.  It is a lot of fun laying your own hardwood floors, they look great in the picture!

 

Tamra/indiana

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Love it when folks machine wood on machine tools meant for metal.... I do it all the time.

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Couldn't I set up the same kind of jig for my bench top drill press?  My jig would just have to include something to keep it stable against the base of the table, and another board at 90 degree angle...  Great picture.

 

or, I could adjust the angle on the base of my drill press.  Does it do that?  (Its kinda early here, and I have no idea why I'm awake this early in the day... ) I know my Grizzly Band saw table can be moved to a different angle...

 

 

 

Tamra/Indiana

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On 7/26/2014 at 7:02 AM, WeekendMiniaturist said:

Couldn't I set up the same kind of jig for my bench top drill press?  My jig would just have to include something to keep it stable against the base of the table, and another board at 90 degree angle...  Great picture.

 

or, I could adjust the angle on the base of my drill press.  Does it do that?  (Its kinda early here, and I have no idea why I'm awake this early in the day... ) I know my Grizzly Band saw table can be moved to a different angle...

 

Yeah you could

On 7/26/2014 at 6:52 AM, Wm. R. Robertson said:

Love it when folks machine wood on machine tools meant for metal.... I do it all the time.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

This thread is very interesting! I love the room box, love the look of wood. And the story behind the scene---

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This thread is very interesting! I love the room box, love the look of wood. And the story behind the scene---

 

Thanks!

Yes, I prefer stained wood, nothing looks worse to me than fine wood like oak that is painted over with white latex slop.

I'm a little less than happy how the basswood takes stain. The floor is mahogany, and if I could get what I needed to make small moldings that I've heretofore purchased from Northern Scale Lumber- I'd make them out of mahogany and other quality woods.

 

I need to hang out at work to-morrow a bit to await a truck shipment I'm expecting and they only gave me a vague time frame of when it will arrive, so I will likely use that wait time to do some more on this box, probably the frame for the glass and the little clapboard section.

 

Those wood chairs and table are very nice quality, they came from Hong Kong.

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Randall, it is fairly easy to make molding out of hardwoods on a mill or drill press, you can use a combination of burs available from jewelry supply shops like Rio Grande. Some people even go on and make their own cutters from old drill bits etc something I still want to learn. Both Dremel and Proxxon also sells some really nice cutters for miniature work.

http://www.riogrande.com/category/tools-and-equipment/120/Burs-and-Drills/5852

On my first house I also used all the ready turned spindles, moldings etc from Houseworks and NOE, as I learned more and became increasingly aware that one could have better finishes with hardwoods I abandoned that first house and just recently started on a new house where I am planning to do all the wood finishes with hardwood. You can see some of what I have done so far on my blog in these two posts, in the first post you will see how I made a door frame molding. Yes, it is a lot of hard work and a steep learning curve to work in hard woods but the end results makes it worth all the hard work one puts into it.

http://elgakoster.blogspot.com/2014/01/building-on-cape-dutch-house-has-begun.html

http://elgakoster.blogspot.com/2014/03/progress-fitting-and-rain-rain-rain.html

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Randall, it is fairly easy to make molding out of hardwoods on a mill or drill press, you can use a combination of burs available from jewelry supply shops like Rio Grande. Some people even go on and make their own cutters from old drill bits etc something I still want to learn. Both Dremel and Proxxon also sells some really nice cutters for miniature work.

 

 

Thanks Elga, I became busy in several ways and I'm on vacation, so I only did very little on my room box these past couple of weeks.

 

Your work shown on your website is impressive!

 

it's funny but I still to this day have this wierd mental image of what South Africa is like (very primitive, rural, grass huts and villages with no electric) that is difficult to shake even after seeing photos, street view in Google and videos showing modern cities and towns,  maybe it's from watching too  much "Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom" as a kid!

 

Anyway, as you say- these moldings can be made on a drill press etc., but I have to think that commercial outfits like Northern Scale Lumber who makes and sells these tiny moldings in 2 foot lengths for a couple of dollars has some kind of mostly automated shaper/machines they simply feed the strips of basswood in and the molding profile is made in seconds, there's just no way they could possibly do it any other way and still be able to sell the moldings for $2 and change.

I have looked at Proxxon, nice tools, I think Northern probably has machines similar to those, and probably custom made cutters.

The only way I can think of how they can run those tiny strips of wood that are only 1 mm or so thick  through such a machine is to use wide boards, put the profile on it's edge then rip that edge off and run the now slightly narrower board through again, repeated untill the board is too narrow to feed through.

 

There just is no way I see of keeping a 2 foot long piece of wood 1 mm thick by 2 mm wide or the like straight and flat, and have them come out consistantly every time, or even be stiff enough to feed through at all. I don't see even clamping down so tiny a strip of wood any way either, that's another reason why I think they are cut from lumber that is planed to thickness and then repeatedly run through a shaper/router and a table saw untill the board is too narrow to handle.

 

I've ordered a number of moldings from them and they are as far as I can tell perfectly consistant every time.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

I started it yesterday by cutting out the plywood for the facade to start with. I had to decide how to make the box open and decided having one side open will work best.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I haven't had much time to get this roombox started, but I am working a bit on shaping the bricks required for some of the facades' brickwork:

 

 

 

These are the Andi's mini bricks, I am running  a batch through a jig I made to use a trimmer router with a bit to shape the one end of the bricks. There is some loss in the process due to breakage, but most of the bricks clamped in a 6-8" long row will route much like this one did.

I didn't figure out how many I need, it will probably be  100-200 for the borders the facade requires.

The length of these needs to be shortened about 1/8" after routing.

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It seems you are making good progress on your roombox.  In reference to post #16; did you decide to use this technique for the ceiling/

 

In post #9, you mentioned that you were not enamored with basswood and stain.  I'm not very fond of staining basswood either; so generally if it is basswood in any of my structures, basswood is painted. 

 

I use a sanding sealer in aerosol can when painting; then used hobby enamels and an airbrush to paint.   I discovered with good prep; I can paint windows for an entire house in a weekend with good weather.  If you use sanding sealer; it seems that you loose some of the detail of the natural grain of the wood. 

 

Tamra

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  • 3 years later...

I forgot I had an acct on this forum... I just registered for membership in the IGMA yesterday, guess I'll start a new thread with my Victorian bathroom!

 

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