Shutters!

My car project was on hold due to supply constraints, so why not undertake a house project? If you have a wooden house you know there’s no shortage of projects and I have just the tools to complete them.

Here’s a 30 year old wooden shutter; sad isn’t it?

I had eleven sets to make and decided to replace them until I got the price to purchase ready made shutters- almost $700 a pair in Western Red Cedar. So I decided to make my own using my CNC machine.

First step was to build a CAD model to cut the slots. I has to cut 836 angled slots to build the shutters. The chances of me doing this without mistakes were close to zero. This is where my CNC was indispensable.

With the CAD model developed I lined up the blanks for the stiles and made some test cuts. Once everything was dialed in I kept running the job until all of the parts were cut.

Next step was the glue up. This was tricky because I had to align all of the louvers into each set of holes before the glue set, then square up and clamp the pieces.

The look pretty good:

Next was painting and hanging the shutters. I sprayed the shutters- don’t ever try to paint louvered shutters with a brush!

Except that it took a fair amount of time I was quite happy with the results and saved about 70 % of the cost.