Setting Circles

Setting Circles

I was pretty comfortable making the setting circles because they would be much larger than the elevation bearings. I finally settled on eleven inches as the diameter because this matched the dimension of the table.

A router will make very good circles with a smooth edge at a nice right angled edge if you are careful. Just make a small guide out of thin plywood you can attach your router to. Then fix it to the particle board at the correct radius, turn the router on and draw a circle. You can also buy a commercial circle guide for a router also.

Don't try this unless you know how to use a router. Many things can go wrong unexpectedly and your fingers are only a few inches away from a very sharp cutting blade that's spinning at about 30,000 times a min.

My measure of success for any woodworking project is to complete the project with the same number and size of thumbs and fingers as I started the project with. So far so good.

This pretty much shows the setup for cutting the azimuth Circle. The router is attached to a circle cutting guide I made to cut out the Pizza Tray. I attached the square azimuth "circle" to a piece of scrap with the air nailer, clamped the scrap to the saw table, attached the router to the guide and then put a small wood screw through the guide into the center point of the azimuth "circle". This is a critical distance so get it as close as you can to the correct value. Turn the router on and cut out the circle. Save the corner pieces for later.
So how do you add the scales?	Well, I used a program written and copyrighted by Glenn Ashmore from Macon called Nth Degree. Glenn was generous enough to give me permission to include it on my site. Click here to download it. This zipped file has both source code and executable. You'll need a laser printer that understands HP Laser Jet print codes. Not postscrip. I don't know about bubble jet. You tell the program the diameter and the number of degrees you want the scales to cover.
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