Amana tambour door router bit set - slick idea

I have been wanting to build my wife a roll top desk for some time but the dilemma always came in on how to make the tambour. The new bit set from Amana is a great idea! No more having to glue slats to canvas or drilling the slats to run a cable down through them. The bits worked great and made it real easy to use different woods. The one drawback that I found was in the instructions and video. They state to mill the stock to 1/2” x 1 15/16” and that is what I did. The issue comes in when setting up the finishing contour path because that dictates the size of the ball and the defines the fit. I test it and found that if I set it up to get the whole contour on the face of the slat, then the ball portion was too small. When I set up to achieve the proper ball/socket fit, then the face of the slat was flat. The pictures show the loose fit and loss of the contour with the proper fit. Unfortunately when I realized this issue, I had already milled all my stock for the desk. It looks nice, but I think that it would have looked better with the proper contour as demonstrated in the video. I would recommend an extra 1/32” to 1/16” on the stock in order to obtain the best of both. The other observation I made was in the video, Lonny Bird’s ball router bit was a 3 flute and the one I received was a 2 flute.

All in all and great idea and design, I just wish I new about the stock issue first.

-- Brandon, Maine, www.maineweddingtrellis.com