Friday, January 16, 2015

Jig to assemble wooden frames

Beautiful day today.  Temperature in the low 50s, bright sunshine.  Shirt sleeve weather.  My bees from all four hives were flying merrily about their entrances so there shouldn't be any problems with constipation.  As reported earlier, the weights of all four hives are in the comfortable levels.

It was warm enough in the shop to start on bee projects for the coming seasons.  In particular, I wanted to make a jig to aid in the assembly of wooden frames.  I have been assembling them one by one but I anticipate I will need 800 or more this year and some sort of aid would be helpful.  The design is simple.  It consists of a rectangular frame made from scrap 3/4 plywood whose length corresponds to the  distance between the end bars (17 inches) and whose width is arbitrary depending upon how many frames are to be assembled at one time. There are a couple of swinging "doors" on each end that, when closed, hold the end bars in a vertical direction.  When open, the "doors" allow the finished frames to be removed from the jig by sliding them sideways.

In use, the doors are closed and latched and end bars are placed in the space between the "door" and the end of the frame.  The top (or bottom, if you wish) bars are placed in the notches in the end bars and nailed or stapled in place.  The entire assembly is turned over to that the bottom bars (or top if you already did the bottoms) can be added similarly and nailed or stapled.  Open the "doors" and remove the finished frames.  The pictures below should explain all.



No comments:

Post a Comment