The Woodshop Shed

Fish wine balancers

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


A trio of what I call wine balancers in the shape of fish. I think the pattern originally came from the woodcraft magazine but I made an MDF template and I've been going from there. I found in making them that I can't really use a flush trim bit to route these things as it tends to not like the sharper lines and often shatters the wood if I use a smaller flush trim bit instead of my large Whiteside compression flush trim bit. The center hole is about 1/4” smaller than what the template called for at 1.25” instead of 1.5” but I realized that long after I drilled the holes in the blanks. All of them are cut out by hand on the bandsaw and then sanded to final shape on the disk sander and spindle sander. I cut the 45 bevel on the bottom by measuring it from the bottom how far it needed to go and then eye balling it on the table saw cross cut sled. Next time I'll cut the bevel first then, cut the rest of the fish out.The edges are hand rounded over except for the center hole with was done with a 1/2” roundover bit in the router table. They are sanded to 320 grit and coated with wood honey.The walnut one is missing parts of the tail fin thanks to getting knocked the concrete floor of the shop and breaking some parts off because of how the grain hit the floor. It still works well though and that one was my test piece. You can see in the 3rd photo the wine bottle being held before I started sanding any of the the fish. It takes a little experimentation to find out the exact point the neck of the bottle needs to be to balance but once it does, its actually pretty stable. The table has a thick pad underneath and pushing the fin base a bit made the fish shift a little but then balanced back out and didn't drop the bottle.

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