• Congratulations to Phil Hamel winner of the April 2025 Turning Challenge (click here for details)
  • Congratulations to Steve Bonny for "A Book Holds What Time Lets Go" being selected as Turning of the Week for 28 April, 2025 (click here for details)
  • Welcome new registering member. Your username must be your real First and Last name (for example: John Doe). "Screen names" and "handles" are not allowed and your registration will be deleted if you don't use your real name. Also, do not use all caps nor all lower case.

Celtic knot

Joined
Feb 26, 2018
Messages
139
Likes
93
Location
Nashville, TN
First...hope everyone has a happy and healthy New Year
Second...sorry to ask dumb questions, but am unable to find info on how to make a celtic knot in AAW video archive or magazine articles. Any help or leads on detailed info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
 
easy way, if you have table saw and good miter fence, and reasonable ability to cut accurately , set miter fence to 45 degrees, set saw blade to cut almost all the way through your blank less about 1/8 inch or so - leaving just enough to hold the whole blank together, (make sure you only cut one kerf at a time!) then cut your kerf strips to width to fill the kerf (or cut a kerf to the width of your strips) , glue in one strip in the first cut, and when dry, true up the faces and flip blank 180 degrees to cut the 2nd kerf (making an X shape in a square blank) the accuracy comes in because you need to get the center of the X dead center in the middle of the blank and the filler strips exactly equal all the way through. glue in your second strip the same way as the first, and turn 'er round, should have a nice celtic knot. I have done a couple of them, but didn't get them exactly perfect.. but even the imperfect ones turned out pretty nice anyway.
 
Thanks for the reply...the trick seems to be to get the kerf and the strips to the same thickness...using a manual saw yields a kerf just under 1/16". Guess I could set up a sanding block and thin it down.
 
Yeah, if you don't have a table saw, then the trick is gonna be getting a perfect kerf cut with a handsaw , but if you have a table saw (typical 1/8 standard kerf or 3/32 thin kerf blade) you can get kerf width strips if you have a wide enough board to rip it in half, then nudge fence a bit narrower and rip both pieces to exactly the same width, then without moving the fence, butt up both pieces side by side (so one piece will be getting cut) and cut a kerf in the outer piece but not all the way through - leave about a half inch uncut, then use handsaw to trim back the "wedge" left by the saw blade to get a semi-flat pushing surface. Take that piece and set the long smooth side against fence, use the notched side to push your filler strip wood through for as many filler strips as you need - since the fence hasnt moved the whole piece should be exactly the cut width less a kerf width, so using it to push another piece through, you get a kerf-width piece on each cut (easier to show than explain). Of course, it does require boards of enough width to be able to do that trick while keeping hands safely away from blade (and guards in place since the thin strips trapped between the push board and the blade can of course catch at the back of blade and come flying back at you)

depending on the size of your pieces, might also be possible to cut your kerfs using a router with a straight bit (and clamping a guide fence to make your angle cuts)

If you have a planer, you can use double stick tape to stick a strip to a carrier board after you get a kerf cut (assuming kerf is nice and parallel) and plane it down to the exact kerf thickness you need so you get a nice tight-fitting filler strip...
 
Back
Top