WEEK 1: 5 SLICES OF SWISS CHEESE

Continuing on my food theme, I present “5 slices of swiss cheese.”

DAY 1:

I decided to stick with “food” as my theme. I drew food-related things that I thought I could make out of wood and replicate relatively easily. I decided to go with the swiss cheese. The plan was to take a single block of wood, drill a bunch of holes in it using the drill press, and then slice it up into 5 pieces. Easy peasy.

NOT easy peasy. I ran into many issues with this plan. I was worried that the height of the block of wood I would need so that the slices weren’t too thin would be too high for the drill to go through. I also couldn’t find a block of wood in the shop that would work for this. Instead, I found a piece of wood I could cut into squares and clamp together:

Then I found a block of wood I could use, so I decided to hold off on that plan. First, I cut off the side of the block of wood to make a square, and sanded it down to form right angles. I drew circles on it in the approximate places I wanted to drill holes.

This was going well until I turned it over and saw all of the mess going on on the back. The wood was splintering bad, and I couldn’t afford to slice off that much and discard it, because then the 5 slices would be too small.

I changed my plan a little. I would keep going drilling holes in this piece and then slice off the top 1/3 or so, and use that as a stencil for the 4 blocks of wood from the original piece I drew the squares on. This is what it looked like when I was done, and after I cut off the top part so only a 1/2 in slice remained. Looks like a slice of swiss cheese to me.

The idea was to use 3 of these 4 blocks, drill identical holes in all of them, and then slice in half so they each produced 2 identical slices of cheese. This gave me one extra in case anything happened. I cut the 4 pieces and realized my math must have been wrong because they came out all sorts of weird sizes. I think it had to do with the widht of the blade on the bandsaw. I sanded them down until they were equal.

Unfortunately, the same thing happened with these guys as did the first one. There was a ton of splintering on the back, which isn’t going to work for me because i need to use the bottom half for a second slice. Enough for today, I’ll figure out the best way to fix this tomorrow.

DAY 2:

Ditched the wood from the other day. Cut a 2x4 into 2 squares and glued them together.

DAY 3:

The first thing I did was sand the edges of the glued block of wo

Before / After

Then, I started drilling holes. I made a block to go under it do avoid the splintering problem I had with the other wood.

This went pretty well once I got the hang of it. The only weird thing was having to bring the drill up when I got halfway through it, to get all of the debris out of the way so the bit didn’t get stuck. Also, at one point little bits from the edge started poking out. I just pushed them back in. The other thing was that the bit I used for the smallest holes wouldn’t go as far down as the other ones, but I think there’s enough space there for 5 slices as-is.

My idea was to slice off the top and bottom (in that photo above on the right) to cut off half of those circles on the edges. I sanded it to make sure I had right angles, and then this happened :(

I thought it was a problem with the pressure I was applying, so I just cut from the other side and sanded it down. I sanded down the front edge and was pretty happy with how it was looking.

The next step was to slice the cheese. I measured a stop block so I wouldn’t have to measure the space on the actual block of wood for each cut. I set it up, started to cut, and then this happened:

I’m pretty annoyed at this. I’m a little worried I won’t have enough space to make the rest of the slices. It will have to wait until Monday when the tension on the bandsaw can be fixed.

DAY 4:

Done! Today I sliced up the block into 5 (mostly) equal slices. One of them got messed up (the blade started wandering like it did the other day but I think that was a problem with how I was applying pressure). I sanded them by hand using sandpaper and tried my best to even out the holes on the sides that ended up not being totally uniform. Overall, I’m happy with the result!