This guy made pantograf of wood by himself and it looks great





"For first lettering test I just traced along a paper template with the stylus. It was slow going - I had to be careful to stay on the lines. With half the weight of the router on the stylus, I was worried that it might tear the paper. But I polished the end of my follower rod, and it slid well enough on the paper without tearing."

His first results were a little bit squiggly. The hard maple that he used was not very suitable for router carving with a V bit.





His next experiment was to carve a shape with varying depths of cut. He cut a sort of wilting flower shape template on the bandsaw.

Instead of a straight shaft, I used the conical follower on the end of my pantograph. The cone would dip deeper into wider sections of the template. As the follower dips deeper, the whole pantograph tilts forward, which also brings the router deeper into the stock.





So he shaped the conical follower with a hand plane held against the spinning piece of wood in the drill press. In retrospect it would probably have been easier to mount the cone in the hand drill and hold it against a running belt sander.





Having had success with the wilting flower shape, he tried reproducing a Times Roman font. Serif'd fonts like that have varying stroke widths, so he was keen to see how it would work out. That first test looked really nice.





Next he made individual letter blocks to form a bigger word, and cut these out on the bandsaw. He wrote an online stencil maker to make the letter block shapes. He drilled holes where there are tight corners to help turn around with the bandsaw blade. To get into the inside, he just started the cut from the outside.





Gluing and gluing





He attached two rails with a groove along the sides of a board to hold the letter blocks in place .





He ended up making quite a few more letter blocks. Every time he went to spell a new name or word, he found that he was short by just a letter or two. It was a good way to use up small scrap bits of plywood.





He added a pin to protrude from the bottom of the follower cone. When he did his initial tests, he founds that when he pushed the follower cone into a tight corner, sometimes he would push it all the way out of the groove. With a pin in the tip of the follower cone, the cone can't ride out of the grove without him lifting it up.





Once the templates are set up, it only takes a minute or two to carve out a sign. It's much faster than following a paper template by eye because you don't have to be as careful. You just have to make sure to trace the follower into every corner of every letter. And the nice thing with this setup is that you have an unobstructed view of the work, so it's easy to see that you covered every corner.





Here's two signs carved from the same template. The top one set to one-third scale, while the bottom one had the pantograph set at half scale.





You can also vary the font weight by adjusting the depth of cut, so various degrees of bolding can be cut from the same template.























