Lazy Susan

My mother-in-law bought a couple hand painted tiles as a sample to do her kitchen in. When she totaled the cost she thought better of it and gave me the tiles and asked me to make something out of it. So I chose a lazy Susan, which I had never made before. Its a simple octagon that I cut into a circle with a circle jig I made on my band saw. But my real challenge was all the small geometry and glue up and of course, I couldn’t have done it without lumberjocks. (The woods are Cherry, Padauk, and lacewood)

I got my inspiration for this lazy Susan from checking out all the posts by fellow lumberjock “Woodmosaic”. I’d never done anything like this before, so I studied “Woodmosaic’s” posts along with his Youtube videos, which were very helpful. However, when I saw how close he put his fingers to the table saw blade, and I said there has to be another way. So I came up with this jig that would hold a strip of wood in the miter saw and cut several different proportional shapes (triangles, parallelograms, and squares). I set it up to cut a 45X45X90 geometry.

I took an old kitchen cabinet door and screwed down a stop block with a 45 degree angle, I then put some adjustable stop blocks on the other side of the blade to set the size.

After adjusting the the stop blocks, I inserted a piece of wood (in this case lacewood) to cut my first triangle

After you cut the triangle, you simply move the wood down so that you can cut a parallelogram of the exact same size

You can continue cutting as many parallelograms as you like, but then you can take the wood and place it against the fence and square of the board by cutting another triangle

At this point you can either repeat step one and cut more triangles or you can adjust the non-angled stop block to cut a square

Now I know what you’re thinking, doesn’t the miter saw chip the corners or throw the piece across the room and the answer is yes. I’d say that about 7 out of every 10 triangles are good and about 3 either chip or fly back behind the saw. But, because it was just a tiny bit of wood and my hands were way farther away from the saw blade, I felt it was much safer than a table saw. Also, it was amazingly quick! I could cut 50 parallelograms/triangles in about 10 minutes (loosing about 15 or so), but man was I impressed when I laid them all out. They fit well with very little gap and if they didn’t look good, I just tossed it to the side and cut another one.

Hope you enjoy the post.

-- Tom, Simsbury, CT