Hatch Gratings - Clipping the End Tabs

[drjeckl]

Simple and quick question from a noobie:  After building the hatch grates with the egg crate pieces, what is best practice (without a belt sander) to clip off the tabs:

1. Cut them off with a knife or cutters
2. Use a Dremel with Drum Sander Sanding Sleeves
3. Use the Micro-Mark Sand-It (I have one and tried it; needs a lot of elbow work)
4. Anything else 

 

Looked everywhere: MSW, Google, some books.  It's such a basic task that apparently nobody wants to document it.

 

Thanks...John

[Lin Feng]

I use a dremel cut off wheel.

[el cid]

I use this micro-saw:

 

https://www.umm-usa.com/catalog/tools_JLC.html

 

Tiny mitre box is also useful.

 

HTH,

 

Keith

[Keithbrad80]

Sometimes if I have lots of small tabs to cut I’ll use a spru cutter and a heavy wood file. Here is the link the spru cutters I use, there pretty cheap and really easy to use and super sharp. After you will have bumps where the tabs used to be, I take a large wood file and drag the file over the entire assembly, as long as the file is only touching the tabs you should be left with a very flat and uniform surface. This is the file I like to use, I have a bunch of different sizes but I found this large one gets the most action. Good luck and hopefully that helps!

 

Also razor saws work well too. 

 

Bradley

Edited March 20, 2021 by Keithbrad80

[drjeckl]

Thanks to you all.  I have all three in my in my tool kit, just haven't used them yet.  Will give it a go.

 

That's what's so great about this place.  Rather than experiment or go on an exhaustive search, Just go ask the help line!

 

John

[wefalck]

... what did people do in those dark pre-Internet ages - experiment

 

You didn't say, what the thickness of the material in question is, so answers can only be guesses. Clipping pieces off is likely to distort/squash the wood, so I would not clip too close, but leave perhaps half a millimetre standing and then sand it flush. Same with a cut-off disc, stay safely away and sand flush afterwards.

[drjeckl]

Experiment, no doubt, and probably with some redoes.  Pre-internet brings up some of my professional history.  For my first job out of college, in 1973, I landed a gig with an outfit that had a multi-year contract with the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to study topological designs for packet-switching networks, the first being the ARPANET.   Won't get into the details of the ARPANET; just Google it.   Got lucky enough to be added as a co-author on 5 or 6 technical papers on the subject.  Our office on Long Island had a connection to the closest node on the net, NYU, at a whopping 9600 bps, which we then divided down into 4 x channels of 2.4 Kbps.  And we thought that was really fast.  Those were the days.  Looking back at it, it was pretty exciting being in on it at the early stage.  Although at that point, who knew it would turn into this.

 

Anyway,  I started clipping grating pieces off, and I did leave some left to be sanded off.  Unfortunately, the stress of a cut dislodged one of the pieces.  Guess I didn't put enough PVA in the diluted mixture I enmeshed the gratings in.  I'll try to be a little less stressful with the cuts and after the trimming, dunk the hatches back into another diluted mixture with a higher ratio of PVA.  Maybe I didn't apply enough pressure when I took them out of their bath.  Will know next time to do so.

 

John

[Dr PR]

I use a narrow kerf hobby saw or jeweler's saw to trim the ends fairly close to the frame. Then I use coarse sandpaper (160 grit) to smooth things and finish with fine grit (320-400). I also have some files that work with most woods, but I think the sandpaper gives me better control. Just place a sheet on the workbench grit up and drag the grating across it.

[rraisley]

I use flush-cutting cutters (one "board" at a time), then sand with a sanding block. I did try a small belt sander once, but it got carried away (without my assistance), and kind of messed one up.