Making the Casters

Since so many of you were interested in how the casters were made, I decided to show you a few photos of the process. The caster wheel consists of  four parts, from left to right they are the wheel, the cup part where the wooden leg fits in, the caster and lastly the axle. The wheel and cup were turned on the lathe from a 1/8" thick brass dowel, the hole in the wheel and the hole in the cup for the leg was drilled while still on the lathe. The axle was cut from 0.020" thick brass wire. The most tricky part to make was the caster part and my husband Greg put a lot of thought into the process.

The caster part was made from 0.078" (2mm) thick brass sheet, Greg marked out all the rectangles for the casters and drilled the holes for the wheel axle and the pin on the cup before sawing out each rectangle.

Next he made two jigs out of steel for the different curves of the caster, here it is in the first jig ready to be filed, a piece of the axle wire is holding it in place.

The bottom curve has been filed.

In the second jig ready to be filed for the next curve.

Out of the second jig, now the back will be filed nice and round around the hole where the pin from the cup fits through.

Now for the really tricky part and it was difficult to take a photo, marking and cutting the slot for the wheel. The slot was made by sawing out the waste with a jewelers saw and then fine tuning with files.

Next Greg put the cup part and the caster together, cutting off the excess on the pin and peening the pin so that the caster won't fall off.

View from the bottom, here you can see the slot for the wheel.

Putting the wheel into the slot and using that massive hammer head in the back to peen the axle so that the wheel will stay put.

Thank you Greg!!!! You have done a beautiful job!!!!!

Elga

Cross banding Veneer tutorial part two

Since my table tops were already the right size, I decided to cut the thickness of the veneer of the sides, using the drill press made shaving off little bits at a time easy. I also set my depth so that a thin piece of the veneer that is glued to the top would be left, like in 0.3mm.

Trying to photograph what is left of the top veneer layer proved to be very difficult, in the end I put a piece of yellow wood on top, hoping that the contrast in color would help, of course now there still is a shadow that is bigger than the veneer, hope you can see it.

Here I am cutting the very thin and narrow strips off cross banding on my table saw using a sliding table.

Since the veneer is so thin it just wanted to curl away from the base while gluing, so I pushed it hard against the side of my glue box and clamped  it down to make sure there wouldn't be any gaps at the top.

After all the sides were glued on I just sanded it nice and smooth and rounded the edges a bit, now you can see no thick veneer edges that looks out of scale in miniature. I will show you later how I made the bottom drawer.

A close-up of the caster wheels my husband made, aren't they just gorgeous. Remember you can click on the photos to see them bigger.

Elga