Sunny Saturday

What better thing to do on a sunny Saturday afternoon when your Mum and Dad are down, than to do some DIY and work on the layout! After botching about widening the door frame of our bedroom and finishing hanging the bathroom door, I managed to have enough time to make a jig and cut the curved boards to size. One of the great things of being the man about the house, is that whatever I am doing with a power tool, it looks like DIY, so when my wife comes out to see how we are doing, it doesn't even enter her head to ask what I'm up to and check that I am still doing the DIY rather than messing about with trains.

First up, I made a template by scribing along the cut of the plot on some spare 12mm ply left over from the side rails, I was going to use some spare laminate but this was too thin and would have made the guide bush on the base of the router sit on the sheet to be cut. I then cut the template using my jigsaw and made sure it was smooth using 80 grit sandpaper.

I then clamped the two sheets at the back making sure they were in line and clamped the jig to the front of the boards 8.5mm from the cut line. The 8.5mm offset is the difference between the diameter of the 30mm guide bush and the 12.7mm (1/2") cutter. Really speaking the measurement should be 8.65mm but I'm not going to split hairs over 0.15mm!

So away I went routing the curve. All was going well until the last pass of the router when I pushed too far and the guide bush went over the end of the template and gave a nice semi circular dent on the edge of my board! Oh well, nothing a bit of filler can't cure later on!