Beveling the staves

My first drum was constructed by cutting the bevels on the saw table, at the same time as tapering the staves. To do this, I had to offset the saw blade at 15 degrees, however this is not really possible with the TRITON saw-table (I had to shift the saw assembly over in the slot) and it was difficult to set the blade offset with any accuracy, which meant a good deal of hand planing to touch up the bevels.

I decided that a better approach might be to route the bevels on a router table, with a 15 degree chamfer bit. This should give a most accurate bevel, requiring little if any fine tuning with a hand plane.

	The router cutter guard has been removed in these pictures for clarity. I never operate the router without the proper safety guards in place.
	This picture shows the chamfer router bit, and how it cuts the 15 degree bevel required for a twelve sided drum. The height of the bit must be adjusted carefully so that the top of the stave only just clears the cutting edge of the router when the stave is hard up against the router fence. This will stop it taking progressively more off the width of the stave if you make multiple passes to cut the bevel. An initial pass will cut the bevel, however one or two subsequent passes may be necessary to finish the cut. It is important that all your staves are the same thickness, otherwise any thinner staves will be trimmed progressively narrower with each pass through the router (as I found out too late with one particular stave). The stave is then turned around (end-for-end) and the second bevel is cut in the other side (as shown in this picture, the nearer edge has already been beveled).

The router cutter guard has been removed in these pictures for clarity. I never operate the router without the proper safety guards in place.

This picture shows the chamfer router bit, and how it cuts the 15 degree bevel required for a twelve sided drum. The height of the bit must be adjusted carefully so that the top of the stave only just clears the cutting edge of the router when the stave is hard up against the router fence. This will stop it taking progressively more off the width of the stave if you make multiple passes to cut the bevel.

An initial pass will cut the bevel, however one or two subsequent passes may be necessary to finish the cut. It is important that all your staves are the same thickness, otherwise any thinner staves will be trimmed progressively narrower with each pass through the router (as I found out too late with one particular stave).

The stave is then turned around (end-for-end) and the second bevel is cut in the other side (as shown in this picture, the nearer edge has already been beveled).

Step 4: Dry assembling the staves

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