Weather Station: The Next Generation #2: Template Solution: Opposite Man

Some may remember the old Seinfeld episode where George decided his normal way wasn’t working out so he vowed to do everything opposite. While things started going in his favor Elaine’s life became like George’s old life and Seinfeld remained even. Not that that has anything to do with woodworking, I was just looking for something clever. In any event I mentioned in Blog 1 that in the original project I was fighting gravity so I decided to remedy the situation by doing the opposite, or maybe just a mirror image. This picture shows the original templates used to space the wings so holes could be drilled through the inner top & bottom.

While these templates worked okay you can see where they could slide downhill toward the outside and away from the middle spacer. It was a bit of a hassle to hold them in place while clamping. Little things like this lead to errors and inacuracies, or they just make the process more frustrating and less fun. The simple solution was to cut the opposite side of the template so the two pieces fall downhill toward the middle spacer, not away from it. BTW, you can view the discussion of the original ‘It’s a Bird It’s a Plane…’ from the original Weather Station blog at http://lumberjocks.com/newTim/blog/7845.

This picture shows the old templates (right) and the new templates (left).

This picture shows how much easier it is to have gravity hold the parts in place (foreground = new templates). In the next blog I’ll show how to make these. At least my way. I hope this is making sense.

-- tim hill www.newcalshop.com