19.01.2014
I realised I have not blogged about the windmill for ages. That is probably because I have hardly made any progress in the past year, nevertheless there has been some work since my last posting so here goes:
I am happy to say that the frame is now finished, doing all the mortise and tenon joints by hand got just a little tedious particularly because of the funny angles. As I want the gears etc. to show I will not bother with cladding so it will be a bare-boned structure.
The superstructure of the windmill contains quite a few circular parts so I made a jig to hold the router in place and a turntable to mount the wood on. After that it was just a process of gluing 8 identical segments together and then lowering the router mm by mm and turning the piece until the ring was done. Unfortunately I don’t know the names in English but the various parts making up the revolving structure were all made in a similar way.
It was good to first practice on the more solid parts before tackling the roller bearing as the inner and outer ring end up quite flimsy.
The rollers themselves is another story altogether as they taper towards the centre and must all be identical. As I do not possess a lathe I had to come up with another solution and a combination of my drill press and router did the trick.
With a screw through the center of a small block of wood clamped in the chuck and the router positioned at just the correct angle the rotating block is lowered into the also rotating router till the stop and I ended up with about 40 identical rollers.