After going with my wife to the lumberyard (where she selected Calico Walnut, a lower grade that has more sapwood and often has a marbled appearance), laying out the parts on the boards, and planing everything to thickness (3/4“ for some parts, 5/8“ for others), I was able to get started on the heart of the project—the tilt out spool blocks. 

 

 

That entailed a lot of drill press work. I started by drilling the shallow wells for the bobbins with a 7/8” diameter Forstner bit. For consistency, I set the stop block, drilled the first hole in each of the 36 blocks, then moved on to the next hole. In case my holes weren’t centered exactly, I kept the back faces of the blocks against the fence at all times. 

 

 

Next, I did the same for the 5 mm holes for the dowels that would hold the bobbins and spools. The dimples left by the Forstner bit made it easy to position the stop blocks. 

 

 

 With all the top surface drilling done, I was getting somewhere.
 

The next task was drilling the holes on the sides of the blocks for the 1/4" dowels that would act as pivots. To help with that, I knocked together a simple jig that held the blocks vertically. 

 

With that done, the spool blocks were almost finished. 

 

 

At this point, I had envisioned using a different tilt stop design, one that did not require the notch on the undersides of the spool blocks as shown in the rendering at the top of this post. I thought that all I needed to do to finish the blocks was chamfer their lower front edges so they wouldn’t contact the spools below when tilted out. (I’ll discuss that more in the next post.) I decided to do the chamfering later. I wanted to start on the rack frames.