Building Angled Jigs

In the current August issue of Furniture and Cabinetmaking Magazine (UK) is an article of mine about building accurate angled jigs. A customer from England has commissioned me in the last few years to build four custom Donkey Ears for his Vogt Shooting Board with the No-Rock Runway. He makes multi-sided boxes and the angles have to be exact. In the article I show the process step by step and give general tips on jig making.

4 comments to Building Angled Jigs

  • Jim Lancaster

    Has anyone ever asked you to create a shooting board/donkey ear combination for making boxes with splayed sides? For example, to cut the sides of a box with 20° splayed sides on a table saw requires the blade to be set at a 41.6° tilt and the miter gauge set at 18.9° to create a mitered edge. And the blade tilt has to be 6.7° the other direction to create butt joints or dovetailed joints. Cutting the parts for small boxes at these angles is too exciting to contemplate. I would much prefer to cut them to approximate shape by hand and clean them up on a shooting board. However, each “splay” angle would require a different setup for both the shooting board and the donkey ear.

    The fellow that invented the Dubby table saw sled (In Line Industries) created an ingenious solution for cutting odd miter angles on the table saw. Have you ever considered adapting the idea to create an adjustable shooting board and an adjustable donkey ear?

    Sincerely,

    Jim Lancaster
    Dallas, TX

  • tico

    Hi Jim, thanks for your question. I have thought about that, but only to a small extent. I have in mind making shallow trays with splayed sides. Now, the boxes you are referring to, what width are the pieces?

  • Jim Lancaster

    I’m working my way down to shallow trays too! (I started out with a tool tray similar to Roy Underhill’s, but with dovetailed sides.) I’m thinking the maximum width of the pieces would be no more than six inches. I’ve been playing around with various configurations in Sketchup assuming a 6″x24″ board, and it may be simpler to use wedges for the miter angle. Mimicking the blade angle is another trick entirely. Do you elevate one edge of the plane track or elevate the piece somehow? Again, I think some kind of wedge would be simpler, but I don’t know. It is a very interesting challenge.

  • tico

    With my ramped shooting board, the 6″ width wouldn’t work on the donkey ears, so a regular flat board would be required. I think that this kind of project would require two donkey ears, each at the same angle of slope but with differently angled fences. Half of the shooting would involve going against the end grain at a steep angle, though. I have not tried planing end grain in that way.

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>