mikeschn wrote:Andrew, did you have a plan for the corners somewhere?
The two ways I can see are:
- Stave-planking - like assembling a barrel. This would have to use steamed timbers that could be bent around the radius, while still being thick enough to provide a decent glue joint between each stave. This would be very skilled work.
- 'Bread and butter' construction using layers glued together and then sanded to a smooth finish. This would be easiest in MDF, because it doesn't have much/any grain, though multi-ply such as baltic birch would be good too - for ply the end grain will be exposed so epoxy coating would be essential.
Here are some photos of a fairly similar job I did with bread and butter construction:
The slices cut out:
The slices assembled into an armadillo:
The armadillo sanded down to a smooth finish:
This job was a plug for a fiberglass moulding, so the inside wasn't finished, but with something like a 24" radius, it wouldn't be hard to do with an sanding disc in an angle grinder.
The downside of this is that it has to be quite thick (say, average of 3/4") to provide good glue surfaces and be rigid enough to sand, so the finished product wouldn't be light.
In order to design the slices, a CAD program would be useful, but it could be done 'by hand' at a push.
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 7:29 pm
. I'd lay it out full sized if I were building it. Those radius outside corners could be mocked up in an open end particle board box. All the radius work could be the same size, just attached differently at the corners. There could be more than one way to build it. Finishing the inside is going to be the difficult task. 
Danny
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