Cutting Wooden Discs

If you can hack up a larger table for the bandsaw you can insert a peg

250mm from the blade which mates with a hole in the middle of your stock. Turn the stock round the peg for a perfect circle. If your bandsaw table is a reasonable size already, as the circle is reasonably small you might get away with a table extension as simple as a sheet of thick ply over the bandsaw table, clamped on at the far side.

Tim

Michael,

Put a screw in the centre of where the circle is going to be in the wood, put a wire with a loop, or a batten with a hole on the screw and fix the wire or the batten to the jigsaw, then saw in a circle.

Jim.

Do you have a router?

BugBear

No, thanks Tim and Jim, i'll give that a try.

Michael

If you don't want a screw hole in the middle of the workpiece, just use reversible adhesive (e.g. double sided tape) to fix a scrap block to the centre of the disc, and screw in to the scrap.

BugBear

If you want a perfect circle, get a router and use that either to cut the circles or to trim them. You can get cheap routers these days and they will give you a vastly better finish than any band or jig saw will do no matter how its guided

Thanks to all that have replied, here is what happened: Try jigsaw. Screwed to batten, then pivoted around centre.The jigsaw blade bent, giving me a chamfered edge. Tried the bandsaw. Make a table for it, end result, the blade couldn't stay on the line. So when to the screwfix trade counter about two hours ago, and bought myself the cheapest router. Just had a go in my workshop, and the bit won't cut deep even. Tomorrow I'll go and get a proper size bit, and try again!

Thanks

Michael

Assuming you are using the router with a guide to cut the circle out from a square, as opposed to cleaning up the edges of a rough cut circle, you need a fairly small cutter (1/4" is about right), long enough to go right through the wood. Patience is then a virtue. You are going to remove much more wood than a saw blade would take out. Don't try to make a cut of more than about 2-3mm in one pass. Go round once at 2mm, reset the cutter depth and go round again, and so on till you go right through (support the workpiece on some scrap or you'll have nice circular grooves in your bench. Router cutters really don't like taking very deep cuts in a single pass, particularly when the cutter is fully surrounded and finding it difficult to clear the waste.

Thanks Norman, just got the bit and just started. I see what you mean about patience :-). With 12 circles, it is going to take a while....

Michael

Indeed! But short of using a lathe there is no way you will get cleaner, better circles.

Ear defenders are not a bad idea either - routers are noisy beasts

Good luck