Gary Nichols
Member
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2007
- Messages
- 92
March 31st should have been the day I finally got to bring home my new Domino. Instead, it was the day I brought my wife home from the first of what would be two cancer surgeries, with a pair of second opinions and five trips to UCSF Medical Center thrown in for good measure. But in between the nursing, cooking, cleaning, foot rubs & driving, I?ve managed to get in some R & D, an hour or two at a time, testing out theories I formulated while sitting in all those doctor & hospital waiting/recovery rooms. So what I offer here is not photos of a completed Domino-assisted project, but a simple and still somewhat unrefined method for you to try out yourself and hopefully make your own fixed-louver doors or window panels.
Our house has forty-five windows of varying sizes, and whether you figure two, four or even eight panels per window, that?s a whole lot of louvers to make. And under most of these windows, are baseboard heating units I recessed into the six inch stud walls, because louvered wooden wainscot looks a whole lot nicer than the standard "Institutional" surface-mounted metal cabinets. Add to that, louvered closet doors for six bedrooms, three and a half baths, plus laundry and mudroom storage. Do you see where I?m going with this yet? But this story almost didn?t even happen. While I was waiting for Domino's arrival & debating between it and the Leigh Frame Mortise & Tenon Jig, Leigh announced a new louver-cutting template for their FMT. Fortunately I waited, because the Domino does so much more. But suddenly, figuring how to make louvers with the Domino became a high priority.
So, just how do you override Festool's engineering and force a Domino to cut "crooked" mortises? Turned out that Domino's retractable indexing pins would become the heart of this scheme. Ever seen that little plastic jig with a pin at each end and a pencil hole in the middle for marking exact centers of boards? Well with the Domino, you simply set its base on the stile edge, with one pin snuggly straddling each side. Just remember to rotate the unit 90? when cutting the opposite stile. The photos show scraps of 1 3/8" and 1 1/8" thick interior door stock with 6mm mortises cut at the widest setting. I haven't done much on 3/4" or 20mm thick material for window shutters with 5mm louvers yet, but I do know that as the stock gets thinner, the mortise angle becomes flatter, too flat actually, and you'll need spacer strips along each side to get back to a good working angle. This will also improve stability of the Domino base sitting on such narrow stock.
To achieve a uniform spacing, stick a 6mm Domino in the mortise you just cut and slide the cutter base up against it for your next plunge. Make sure both pins are kept snug against the stile. Using a full Domino as a spacer places the bottom of the upper louver about even with the top of the lower louver, leaving little or no overlap. This may be fine for heating vents or closets, but if some amount of privacy is an issue, you can increase the overlap by milling the exposed part of the Domino thinner, thus decreasing the space between the louvers and increasing the overlap. Make sure to always insert this milled side toward the cutter base. I used a Forstner bit in my drill press and set the plunge depth to get a uniform thickness. In the future, I'll cut the mortises deeper, offering more foundation and less play in the spacer-Domino.
Adjustable louvers are cool, yes, but if you've ever tried maneuvering all those louver pins into their holes while assembling the stiles & rails before the glue sets, you'll appreciate the next few sentences. After cutting all the stile & rail and louver mortises, just glue up the frame without the louvers. That simple. Then sand, stain if you must, and oil-finish the louver stock and assembled frame separately. Now that the urgency of curing glue has passed, you can slip the louvers into the mortises, one at a time, at your leisure. Cut the louver stock to be slightly less than the opening plus the depth of one mortise. First, slide completely into one stile until it clears the other side, and then pull back out as you guide it halfway into the opposing stile. 5mm & 6mm louver slats are flexible enough to do this pretty easily. If the fit is exceptionally loose, a drop of glue should keep them from coming back out. I think starting next to the rails and work toward the center of the open areas is easiest. I ask for "quarter-sawn fir", but it's billed as "clear fir" and some boards do have the "quarter-sawn" grain oriented more on the edge than on the flat side. These are the ones to rip for the louvers, since that edge is what will actually show in the finished project. Thicknes the stock with your planer, but if you happen to have a Performax 16-32 drum sander with 220 or finer grit sitting around (and I do), a final pass on both sides will be even better. If you got it, use it, I always say. A 1/8" round over bit in my router table seemed to match the 3mm radius pretty well, but I actually got surprisingly good results just using my Radi-Plane on all four edges.
The following photos are pretty self-explanatory. As you can see, beveling the rail to match the louver angle exposed too much flat-sawn grain on a quarter-sawn project. I then went to a rabbit like our store-bought door. A little less rabbit, next time. The profile photo depicts the bottom and intermediate rails. Obviously, an actual 6' 8" door would have considerably more louvers between them.
The "No photos, didn't happen" law may not apply here, since nothing got completed, but something did happen. I stumbled onto an idea; hopefully a good one, and now I share it with the FOG Community. Hopefully you all have more time than I do right now, and can do something constructive with this. Who knows, some day Festool may make a nice jig that does a better job, but until then.
Gary Nichols
Our house has forty-five windows of varying sizes, and whether you figure two, four or even eight panels per window, that?s a whole lot of louvers to make. And under most of these windows, are baseboard heating units I recessed into the six inch stud walls, because louvered wooden wainscot looks a whole lot nicer than the standard "Institutional" surface-mounted metal cabinets. Add to that, louvered closet doors for six bedrooms, three and a half baths, plus laundry and mudroom storage. Do you see where I?m going with this yet? But this story almost didn?t even happen. While I was waiting for Domino's arrival & debating between it and the Leigh Frame Mortise & Tenon Jig, Leigh announced a new louver-cutting template for their FMT. Fortunately I waited, because the Domino does so much more. But suddenly, figuring how to make louvers with the Domino became a high priority.
So, just how do you override Festool's engineering and force a Domino to cut "crooked" mortises? Turned out that Domino's retractable indexing pins would become the heart of this scheme. Ever seen that little plastic jig with a pin at each end and a pencil hole in the middle for marking exact centers of boards? Well with the Domino, you simply set its base on the stile edge, with one pin snuggly straddling each side. Just remember to rotate the unit 90? when cutting the opposite stile. The photos show scraps of 1 3/8" and 1 1/8" thick interior door stock with 6mm mortises cut at the widest setting. I haven't done much on 3/4" or 20mm thick material for window shutters with 5mm louvers yet, but I do know that as the stock gets thinner, the mortise angle becomes flatter, too flat actually, and you'll need spacer strips along each side to get back to a good working angle. This will also improve stability of the Domino base sitting on such narrow stock.
To achieve a uniform spacing, stick a 6mm Domino in the mortise you just cut and slide the cutter base up against it for your next plunge. Make sure both pins are kept snug against the stile. Using a full Domino as a spacer places the bottom of the upper louver about even with the top of the lower louver, leaving little or no overlap. This may be fine for heating vents or closets, but if some amount of privacy is an issue, you can increase the overlap by milling the exposed part of the Domino thinner, thus decreasing the space between the louvers and increasing the overlap. Make sure to always insert this milled side toward the cutter base. I used a Forstner bit in my drill press and set the plunge depth to get a uniform thickness. In the future, I'll cut the mortises deeper, offering more foundation and less play in the spacer-Domino.
Adjustable louvers are cool, yes, but if you've ever tried maneuvering all those louver pins into their holes while assembling the stiles & rails before the glue sets, you'll appreciate the next few sentences. After cutting all the stile & rail and louver mortises, just glue up the frame without the louvers. That simple. Then sand, stain if you must, and oil-finish the louver stock and assembled frame separately. Now that the urgency of curing glue has passed, you can slip the louvers into the mortises, one at a time, at your leisure. Cut the louver stock to be slightly less than the opening plus the depth of one mortise. First, slide completely into one stile until it clears the other side, and then pull back out as you guide it halfway into the opposing stile. 5mm & 6mm louver slats are flexible enough to do this pretty easily. If the fit is exceptionally loose, a drop of glue should keep them from coming back out. I think starting next to the rails and work toward the center of the open areas is easiest. I ask for "quarter-sawn fir", but it's billed as "clear fir" and some boards do have the "quarter-sawn" grain oriented more on the edge than on the flat side. These are the ones to rip for the louvers, since that edge is what will actually show in the finished project. Thicknes the stock with your planer, but if you happen to have a Performax 16-32 drum sander with 220 or finer grit sitting around (and I do), a final pass on both sides will be even better. If you got it, use it, I always say. A 1/8" round over bit in my router table seemed to match the 3mm radius pretty well, but I actually got surprisingly good results just using my Radi-Plane on all four edges.
The following photos are pretty self-explanatory. As you can see, beveling the rail to match the louver angle exposed too much flat-sawn grain on a quarter-sawn project. I then went to a rabbit like our store-bought door. A little less rabbit, next time. The profile photo depicts the bottom and intermediate rails. Obviously, an actual 6' 8" door would have considerably more louvers between them.
The "No photos, didn't happen" law may not apply here, since nothing got completed, but something did happen. I stumbled onto an idea; hopefully a good one, and now I share it with the FOG Community. Hopefully you all have more time than I do right now, and can do something constructive with this. Who knows, some day Festool may make a nice jig that does a better job, but until then.
Gary Nichols
