Windows and Doors

My brother Tony made all the doors and curved windows. His wife Louise sanded out all the tooling marks - a big job in itself!

Tony has a CNC router. As the rockwork was done first, I got the local surveyor to record the positions of each end of each rock with their thodolite. In the CAM program(Vector) we use, I was then able to draw up the windows in 3D and wrap them to a cylinder of the appropriate radius and then make any adjustments so it would fit the surveyed points. Then we divided each window into peices (you can see on the RH screen in the photo), copied each peice to a new file, laid it flat and developed tooling paths for three faces of the outside of the windows and all four faces of the divider bars. Because the windows are arched, as well as fitting a circular room, the faces of the peices can have quite a twist, yet the rebate for the glass has to be flat (In the photo of the screens the yellow lines are the rebates). Each block of wood had to be pre thicknessed, and long enough to leave about 20mm as an index on each end, so that when it was rotated, its bottom left corner was at (0,0,0). This was all well and good, but it was up to Tony to join all the peices together - all mortise and tenon - and  to keep on radius; he had to constrct a template - as you can see in the pictures. He would join several peices together (unglued) only to find the first or second joint needed a shave off one side.


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