Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Even if you don't use it every week, you got to have the Rotozip tool (or its Dremel counterpart). This is kind of a cross between a router and a jigsaw and a power drill. It uses a fluted bit and it lets you cut fantastically complicated shapes as the bit turns at a frightening speed. What I needed was fantastically simple shapes, but all alike: eight big circular disks and several smaller ones. Well, I had the circle cutter accessory from another project a couple of years ago, but it will only make a 10-inch disk, and small disks wouldn't do this time. A couple of pages further on you can see why.

When we built The Play's the Thing in 2001, the design called for a half-circle with a radius of about 4 feet functioning as the hearth. I built this ugly compass thing from a piece of 1x6 and tried to use it to guide the tool for cutting the 3/4 inch plywood top. Disaster. Embarrassment. Nothing would stay aligned, and the Upstage part of the platform featured a series of nasty gouges. The construction boss saved the day by finishing the cut with a jigsaw. So the 14-inch radius disks for Rosencrantz called for more thought. These photos show the solution that worked: I took the circle cutter apart and screwed its radius arm to a piece of plywood, then drove a drywall screw in to serve as the pivot.

I say this solution "worked," but that doesn't mean everything was sweetness and light. You simply would not credit the amount of noise it made—to be fair, each of these disks had a circumference of 80 inches and had to be cut from a material heavier than the tool was designed for. So there was the racket, and then there was the problem of the bits. Not made for this kind of industrial output, they kept breaking. I went through eight bits in two days, at $1.60 a pop. Some of them lasted through several cuts, others not even long enough to get warm. But we got disks good enough to use for the cartwheels and the barrel heads.

This isn't a new discovery, but a word of caution: Drill bits and Rotozip bits break with a sharp, sharp edge. Too sharp. I still recall extracting a broken drill bit from something and finding several minutes later that I was bleeding from half-a-dozen tiny cuts on my fingertips. Never felt 'em.

Aug. 26, Year 3
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