Mitering glazing bars

Now with more pictures and fewer words!

[ soundtrack : The Hot Sardines - ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’ ]

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These days my colleague is working out west of town, at an old Vicarage, or priest’s farm as we would call it. A big painting company has the main job and hires us to do the woodwork. My mate works on site and brings me the bits he’s unable to fix in the wild.

Here’s a double door; it’s not that old, factory made in the eighties. Notice the three double-glazed fixed windows up above and how they’re held in place by blocks of wood?

That’s because the glass-trim that used to affix them are in my shop so that I can make copies of them.

They might look square (four sides of equal length), but they’re not! They are rectangles. This meant that instead of symmetrical and familiar mitre angles of 45º & 22,5º I had to use my old school trigonometry and make a sketch.

colour-coded because I know how easily I am confused

Then I made a full-size drawing on a scrap of MDF. When accuracy is wanted, use a beam compass! It’s easier to measure distances than angles accurately.

Then I made the sticks with lots to spare, allowing for inevitable mistakes.

Now for the fun part: I knew that I would have to mitre the sticks at acute and odd angles — and precisely! — if I was to pull this off. My solution was to make a mitre-planing-jig. First, I marked out the angles on a thick block and bandsawed it as close to the line as I dared:

Then I planed down to the line …

… before I cut the double-wedge-block in two and mounted both parts on a base-plate and added some ‘guide-rails’ …

… so that I could plane my sticks at just the right angle, like so:

Now I could go to work on the actual parts. First, marking out.

Second, rough-cutting on bandsaw.

Then I could place the stick in the jig and slice it down to the line :-)

I also needed a tiny, secondary mitre at the very tip of the piece. I did that with a block plane.

I won’t dwell on the halving cross-joint in the middle, it’s pretty straightforward so I’ll just show the pictures without verbiage.

Isn’t that the cutest marking gauge? It’s from Veritas’ miniature range of tools, I bought it especially for tiny marking jobs like this :-)

When I was satisfied that all parts would fit nicely together — still with square cross-sections — I routed the profile / moulding using my little router table.

I glued them using epoxy and a ‘string-clamp’ (for want of a better word).

No need to check the diagonals for once!

After a gentle touch-up with a small smoother …

… I think it turned out all right — and besides, they’ll be painted :-)

Now everything is ready for m’colleague who’ll mitre the rest of the glass trim on site — that’s why I’ve made him the ‘mitre box’ you can see in the background; it reduces spelching on the site chop-saw.

And so the days pass from spring to summer.

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