What's Your Angle?

10/12/2008 11:05:00 AM by PeterOxley

Usually cabinet doors and glued-up panels involve joints that are flat and square. Every once in awhile, a panel requires us to deal with other angles.
From the start, wedges are tricky. After calculating and cutting the angle (a good taper jig comes in handy here), matching the grain between the wedge pieces is the next challenge. Sometimes the grain in the two halves of the original board will come together well enough ...
... but sometimes not ...
... however, with some patience and lots of rearranging, acceptable matches can be found from unrelated pieces.
Wedges don't clamp together well. As soon as pressure is applied with clamps, the wedges tend to back out of the assembly. Another problem is that the arc created by a series of wedges doesn't give a good surface for the clamp to catch. One solution is a glue jig with blocks to prevent backing out and shims driven next to the assembly to create clamping pressure.
Of course, the wedges don't create enough challenges, so this design calls for a quarter circle in one corner. A router and trammel cut the arc to receive the quarter circle.
At this point, the panel assembly looks like it will never go into a frame, but with a couple of passes on the panel sled ...
... and a couple of passes on the table saw, the rectangular panel emerges!