Bamboo Tips - Extreme Rodmaking
Nunley Dethroned

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I have finally gotten back into the shop after 9 months of dealing with a torn rotator cuff that messed up my entire existence. I decided to make a Medved style beveler that would be dedicated to squaring strips. Following a tip from Dale Foote I made many of the parts from high density plastic. It was beautiful, and accurate. There wasn't a single extra hole in the faceplate, and it even looked good. I did some test strips and they came out square and straight. I even found that I could use it to remove the enamel. So I decided to get going with two rods that had been split out late last winter. It kicked butt. within a few minutes the tip strips were the straightest ones I had ever produced, and had constant dimensions for the next phase of tapering. The butt sections went equally well, right until the router fell off the faceplate.

It took out the strip, which shot to the end of the workbench and hit my new Brian Smith style  node press and knocked it to the floor, taking a chunk out of the top piece. The router bit came off, ate the strip, and then proceeded to eat my perfect plastic bed that had perfect dimensions. Then it shot off somewhere, but not before chewing up the faceplate a bit. The router was making a strange hoo-hooing noise as it spun madly. I finally got it unplugged. I looked all over for the router bit, and decided it had fallen under one of the workbenches. I grabbed a flashlight and got down under there, only to find out that the flashlight didn't work. Got up and grabbed another. This one turned out to be the one with the red tape over the lens for night fishing. By this time I wished that I had vacuumed the basement floor better. I was covered in dog hair, shavings, and dust. I figured that the logical end to the story was my butt coming in contact with the router bit and ending up in the ER, but that is the only thing that didn't happen. I found it after about 20 minutes - it was inside a glove laying on one of the shelves a couple feet away.

What happened was that I went for cosmetics over function. I had not drilled the mounting screw  holes entirely through the faceplate, but had done shallow holes and tapped them. The bolts simply did not have enough of a bite to keep things in place. I redrilled them through and through, and now use nuts, lock washers, and a dab of epoxy to make sure that the incident is not repeated. I wasn't in any danger. I had good hand and eye protection, and I feed the cane in so my hands never come anywhere close to the blade.

Nunley, move over. There is a new sheriff in town.  (Jeff Schaeffer)

Sorry Jeff,

Close, but no cigar!! No trip to the ER? Bob is still King!!

Glad there wasn't an injury!  (David Dziadosz)