Sherline: Flycutting Too-Long Acrylic Panels

The Totally Featureless Clock will have a black acrylic case with a Graylite Lexan faceplate. The top & bottom panels are 11.75 inches long, which is much too large for the Sherline’s 9-inch maximum X travel.

Fortunately, in this case I can cheat.

This setup cut the panels to the proper width. A pair of parallel blocks, made from some mysterious glass-like material and ground very nicely flat, support the panel just over the body of the four toolmaker’s vises lined up along the tooling plate. I drilled the brown bookshelf rails to match the tooling plate and secured them with 10-32 studs.

The front rail secures the vise bodies to the tooling plate; they’re aligned parallel to the X axis by the simple expedient of laying a parallel along the back edge and matching that to the tooling plate. No real precision is in order here; the flycut is across the whole top edge.

The rear rail holds the movable vise jaws down; they tend to rise up just slightly when tightened, but the difference amounts to barely enough to release pressure on the parallel blocks. Not enough to matter, as it turned out.

The general notion is to flycut about 2/3 of the length of the panel, then slide it far enough to cut the remainder. Flip it over and flycut the other side the same way.

About 1000 rpm and 150 mm /min, cutting 0.5 mm or so on each pass.

This worked surprisingly well. I expected to find a bow in the middle due to an uneven bandsaw cut on the initial downward side, but it was all good; evidently the blocks were wide enough to average things out.

The joint where the two cuts meet turns out to be visible, but barely detectable with a fingernail: entirely suitable for this application. I’ll hit the sides with  sandpaper on a sheet of plate glass before bonding them  to the faceplate.

Flycutting the end panels was much simpler: one pass clears their entire length. I moved the clamping rails to simplify the whole process; turned out that clamping the movable jaw didn’t really gain very much at all while complexicating the slide-the-stock process beyond belief.

Overall, the width varies by about two mils along the length of the long panels and they’re perfectly straight as measured against a surface plate. Definitely close enough!