Back to Cutting Styrene!

Although it's been a while since I posted, I have been been working away behind the scenes. When I last posted, I noted that I'd decided to go back to styrene legs, and that I'd discovered I'd stopped cutting styrene at the point of the ankles. At least that's my memory of it! Anyway, I needed to do some more cutting, set up my router table again, and stuff like that.

I made many trips to the hardware store, because I found I needed to make a new router table. You see, I'd left my old one outside (sans router) to use as a painting table, and it got rained on in December and warped a bit. So I bought some plywood. It turned out to be too thick for the router mounting hardware! Went back to the hardware store: no M4 screws long enough available!! I finally decided to use the old table and clamp it to my work table in the dining room. Whew -- it's flat enough!

One of the first items needing cutting (or rather re-cutting) was the set of uprights for the shoulder hubs. My hand-cutting just wasn't accurate enough. Here is a picture of how each piece came out a different height due to the "flashing" from hand-breaking the scored styrene:



These are also different lengths (sigh) which creates the illusion that the bottoms were not level when the pic was taken. In short: they needed to be re-done, as having them the same height is critical.

I'd realized such things when I last cut styrene, but somehow these got missed. Anyway, time to set up to give them the router treatment!

First, I needed to create new "patterns" for them -- I decided to just use a square and ruler rather than print another set:



First cuts were by hand to leave just a bit for the router to remove cleanly:



Next I prepared the remaining patterns (by affixing them to the styrene using tacky spray) for the hand-cutting that needs to be done before routering:



The patterns are almost all stuck on (and I was relieved to find I had enough styrene left!), so next I'll cut, then router. Wow this feels like last summer all over again! :-D

Well good thing I've got this to do, as we've got rainy days ahead, so no painting -- which is what I'd have wanted to do. More soon!