littlerat
by Jon on Dec.10, 2009, under workshop
Well, my littlerat has arrived courtesy of philly.
Just in the process of mounting it onto the wall – pics to follow.
Added:
Had a couple of hours today to get it all mounted on the wall.
First thought was to mount the 24″x5″x2″ bit of wood directly onto the breeze blocks. But, I decided in the end to put a couple of battens up with some 1/2″ board on top then fasted the woodrat board to that. This seems to have worked well and everything is rock solid.
Now I just need time to have a play and check it all works correctly – can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t.
December 13th, 2009 on 3:29 pm
Well, I’ve had chance to play with it. I have to say I’m impressed with how easy it is.
As I’m in the process of making a jewelry box for swmbo so I’ve been practicing the joints for that. At couple of things I’ve found which I’m not a fan of.
1) the blue cutter block. I’m not entirely sure whether this is me doing something wrong or not (will need to re-read the manual to find out) but I found that it stopped me making cuts deeper than 10mm. Hmmm, I can’t imagine that is correct. I actually ended up routing out the center of the block by mistake so will order another one of these.
2) Errors in marking/aligning to pencil marks.
There is an inherent problem in the way you align to a pencil mark. The problem I forsea are:
a) you need to measure and mark by hand.
b) you are aligning to a pencil line – which you have put in place by hand.
two is two too many – and they are avoidable problems.
The way I’m intending to remove these problems is 1) fit a moveable ruler to the left hand side of the machine. It needs to be moveable to allow for differing sizes of router bit – unless I just set the ‘zero’ reading to that of the center line. 2) make a marking cursor. This is actually quite simple. It’s just going to be a bit of 5mm plexi glass fitted where the current cursor goes. It’ll have a score line on it to line up the the ruler and purhaps one of those tiny magnifying lenses – that would make lining things up a lot easier.
Paralax (sp ?) error. One thing that can easily creap in is paralax error when you’re alinging the cursor to the pencil lines (or ruler when it’s sorted). Making half of the scribe line on the back of the cursor and half on the front would sort this. If you’re looking slightly from one side then you’d see 2 lines but if looking from bang on the front you’d only see one continuous line – sorted. Since the score lines can be very thin it should make alignment a heck of a lot less error prone.
I’m sure even if perfectly aligned there’ll be the odd fetling of the joints.
My first joints certainly aren’t perfect – there are the odd gaps to sort out. But hey, that just makes them look more like hand made joints
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One thing to add is that the T11 works perfectly in this littlerat
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A 8mm reducing sleeve and 1/4″ collet are on their way (hopefully) so I’ll be able to use whatever size bits I want in the router.