Scroll Saw Blog

This clock is a moderately difficult pattern designed by Pedro at www.finescrollsaw.com. You can get it from him at this address (at finescrollsaw.com). It is much easier than the “Dragons Clock” I did, but a little more difficult than the “Blois Goblet“. This pattern was in a group of several patterns I purchased from him recently. It comes on one A4 size sheet and two A3 size sheets, printed in color. The pattern itself is fine-lined, obviously from a vector-graphic type program. This makes the lines very fine and consistent and circles circular. This is much better than many patterns I’ve bought which are copies of hand drawn patterns.

The instructions are sparse, pretty much saying ‘cut the black lines, blue dashed lines are pieces above, pink dashed lines are pieces below.’ They also state that the pattern “is intended for advanced scrollers”. I didn’t have any trouble figuring out how things went, and if you’ve done a few of the more complex patterns you should, too. Most patterns intended for this audience don’t have any detailed instructions either. A small diagram in perspective of the assembled clock would have been nice, but you can see one rendered on his website so this is not much of an issue either.

Like I mentioned above, Pedro says the pattern is for advanced scrollers. However, there was really not much in the way of complex cutting on this pattern. The most intricate cutting would be the veining making up the belts on the soldier. The trick is to cut them in such a way you don’t have to cut into an already thin piece. Also, due to the oak grain, I cut from the outside towards already-cut lines. That way if I make a mistake or the drill bit hole is not vertical I can modify my cutting so I don’t ruin the piece.

Here’s a close-up of the soldier here:

The sailor on the other side is a lot easier to cut. The faces on both can be tricky, mainly because if you goof up the cut it’s a lot more obvious. Here is the sailor and his gun:

The rest of the back piece is pretty straightforward. You have the normal issues of cutting a large panel (11″x16″), including cutting smoothly with the blade at the ends of your arms with the panel trying to get you in the stomach, but there is not many delicate cuts in that position. One trick I use on these large panels is to cut the entry hole towards the center. That way most of the cut is with the bulk of the panel behind the blade and supported by the table. There is some twisting/turning on the flowers in the center post (right above the “heart” and right below the movement. They are duplicated on both front and back pieces, and can be a little ticklish.

The area around the movement is not ticklish, but does have a lot of repetitious half-circles that need to be as identical as possible. I cheated on the circular holes and used a brad-point drill bit. There is one set on the front piece, and a concentric set on the back piece. All where done with the 1/8″ bit. Yep, I cheated, but at least the holes are circular! Here is the top of the clock with the area mentioned:

You can better see how the clock is put together by the side view. The back piece has two tabs fitting in slots in the top base, while the front piece has a single tab. I cut the pattern right on the lines and didn’t need the usual trimming to get the tabs to fit. The pattern is very good about this–despite my cutting ability :-).

One thing I modified from the pattern was the connecting pieces from the back to front around the movement. Pedro has four pieces of 1/8″ wood with tabs. Knowing my ability (or lack there-of), I replaced these with some strips of 1/8″ Baltic Birch. I don’t have to be very precise in the tabs or the slots, and the Baltic Birch is a little stronger than 1/8″ hardwood. Of course, the plywood would look ugly if you happened to look around the side, so I covered them with a strip of sub-1/16″ oak that I soaked and bent so it would be in compression when I attached it to the supports. That way if the glue didn’t hold, it wouldn’t snap off. To make the strip I planed a piece of the oak as thin as I dared–it measured somewhere around 0.080″ on the micrometer. I soaked it in a container of water and formed it. Rubber bands and clamps held it in shape until it dried. Here is a close up of the strip in place:

I used some quarter-sawn water oak that blew over on the farm when Katrina ripped through in 2005. The log itself wasn’t cut into lumber until 2006 and air-dried outside for another year. The sapwood was spalted, but solid, and the heart was very sound. Water oak is a type of red oak that is very common in our area, and can get rather big quite fast. It’s not considered one of the better red oaks, and is supposed to warp/check worse then normal. However, the tree was on the ground, so we threw it on the sawmill (a Cooksaw MP-32). To avoid the warping issue we quartersawed the log. When I grabbed a board from this stack here in 2007 and made a wide panel from it, I noticed it had very nice flake in it. It’s most noticeable on the soldier and sailor.

The air-dried board was not perfect though. I still had some warping issues when it was on the scrollsaw. This didn’t happen while the panel was just sitting around, so I’m guessing there was some unequal transfer of moisture between the bare back side and the pattern side that was also covered in tape. I ended up putting tape on the back as well. I can’t confirm this helped, though the panel didn’t warp worse after I put on the tape. After the pieces were cut most of the warp went away.

After the fretwork was done I fed both the front and back pieces through the Grizzly 12″ “Baby” drum sander. I used 300 grit paper, and didn’t have any problems with fretwork breaking off. This grit left a very smooth finish. All pieces were soaked in 50/50 boiled linseed oil/paint thinner (BLO), with excess BLO wiped off after a few minutes. I used a combination of Arlenes Tacky Glue and gelled super glue to assemble the clock.  The movement is a 2-3/4″ insert that uses a single AAA battery.

Overall, this was a nice, rather simple (compared to other patterns from Finescrollsaw.com) pattern.  If I concentrated on it, it would take about a weekend to complete (not including BLO curing time).