Fence Progress

Before I start I would like put a small warning, this can be a little bit fiddly but patience does pay off.

So as a teaser (Apologies for the quality on the photo, shot at night and away from workstation)

The following is the prototype (don't worry the fence is straight and level)

It did take a bit of playing around with the cut sizes but after a couple attempts, I have settled on 1mm.

The sheet of balsa wood that was used:

930mm (L) x 100mm (W) x 1.5mm

Setting the cutter to 1mm and placing it at the start of the sheet. Hold the sheet gentle but firmly (If you did what I did I snapped a section of the sheet with too much pressure and it hanging on my cutting board)

Anyway using your free hand holding the cutter, run this down the length of the board.

Paying special attention to when you start the cut and when you finish the cut. The reason for this is because I found the cutter to deviate and can take a small nic out of those points. This will affect how your strips turn out.

This will take a bit of time, the most important thing is to take your time and not rush. Here is the cut.

One thing you will notice is that after you have cut all of the pieces, you are left with a rectangle piece. I wanted square pieces for the fence rails.

This part need a lot of care and patience, as if you rush it you will end up snapping heaps of the pieces. Now I did snap a few pieces and some did not slice properly.

So turning the newly cut pieces on the opposite edge I set up the cutter at the end of the board, make sure the blade is set deep enough or you won't cut right through. This is important and you wont be able to remove this fine strip afterwards.

I slowly slid the cutter along until the rail poked out the other side of the cutter, then gently grabbing the end while holding the cutter in place and with my thumb holding the rail square against the fore edge pulled it through:

After a bit of effort the pile looked a little like this:

And the mess:

You will probably notice that not all of my pieces turned out into one length. I managed to get 64 complete length's of balsa with a pile of smaller pieces. Some of these will be used for posts and spare rails.

I decided to base most of the fence, I will start out with straights and the work cross sections and corner pieces into the mix.

I went with balsa as the base.

Onto the size, each piece will be 150mm long x 15mm wide x 2.5mm thick.

Each full length rail should make a section. So with 64 pieces that works out into about 32'. More than enough for my needs.

When I build some cornfields ect I will attach these to the base.

Well that's it for tonight, tomorrow will see me stain all of those rails and cut them. Each section of rail with be cut to 20mm.

I will also start preparing the bases for the rail sections. A sheet of balsa (930x75x2.5) should give me approximately 30 bases

Stay tuned for the next update