Making Shutters?

[Ron Kurzius]

Hello all,

I'm going to make 22 shutters and was wondering if anyone had any great ideas that could ease the pain. The last time I did 8 of them and I bought some 5/4 Fir decking for the slats, ripped it into thirds and then ripped those in half and then through the planer to 5/16. It didn't seem to bad at the time I think there were 140 of them, with this new order there are more then 700.

The last time I did MT joints but this time I'm thinking about dowels, I figure there will be 264 dowels, lot of doweling.

So any one have any thoughts other then I'm nuts

[Dave Richards]

Are these shutters with moving slats or fixed?

[Ron Kurzius]

Fixed, 20 3/16X 62" shutter size, slats are 17 5/8X 1 3/4X 5/16

[Mel Fulks]

If you don't have CNC or access to one of the old machines that cut the mortises for the slats with round edges, you can
make the old style bevel edge slats and cut the slots in the stiles with dados guided by a ratchet stick. And that older type
looks better.

[jack forsberg]

As Mel said you can't bet the old louver grovers. that said you did not say interior or exterior and some designs are no good on the exterior,

you can cut dowels on the end with simple jigs and this is stronger than drilling into the thin louver for a pin.

louver 1.JPG

louver.JPG

if you can find this hardware and there interior it sure would make finishing easy.

louver 2.JPG

[Keith Outten]

A long time ago there was a great set of plans for making shutters in Woodsmith magazine. They had a set of router jigs that you build to make the process faster and more accurate. A friend of mine made interior shutters for his home using the Woodsmith plans.

[Dave Richards]

Mel's suggestions are good. I don't have a CNC machine in my shop so I'd probably set up the Router Boss to make the mortises. They could be through cuts on the center layer of a three-layer glue up or simple angled mortises. If you wanted to use a router to make these mortises, it would be fairly simple to design a set up to make those mortises or angled dadoes.

I've got a book that shows a plan for a router-based mortising jig that puts the router on a long trammel arm. The router swings through an arc of maybe 1 degree and makes a curved mortise but it is so close to straight that it works fine that way.

[Von Bickley]

22 shutters & more than 700 slats.

I would probably start back drinking and smoking......

[Ron Kurzius]

I made the jigs the last time for the router and will be using those. These are exterior shutters duplicating what is there. I made the first 8 out of vg fir because I don't have much faith in modern day pine. So I have a system down, mostly looking for something I may have missed or not thought of to make it easier.

[jack forsberg]

I made the jigs the last time for the router and will be using those. These are exterior shutters duplicating what is there. I made the first 8 out of vg fir because I don't have much faith in modern day pine. So I have a system down, mostly looking for something I may have missed or not thought of to make it easier.

these are how they were made but there where a slue of machines for all the processes not just the grovers

[Peter Kelly]

I wonder how complicated it'd be to create an indexable angled mortising jig for a Domino.

[Mel Fulks]

I've seen them done with the router jigs,and they worked fine. I do think the ratchet and dado system is faster, especially if
using white pine instead of fir. Less tear out. We used to make some of them with an applied narrow moulding that covered the line of dados. I worked for a company that had a machine like Jack posted that was at least 80 years old and
starting to need work and took up a lot of space. They replaced it with a modern much smaller machine. Smaller was good
since only a couple of years after they bought it the plastic and aluminum shutters took over. When you have no work to
do....the smaller expensive machine is at least less in the way.

[jack forsberg]

I've seen them done with the router jigs,and they worked fine. I do think the ratchet and dado system is faster, especially if
using white pine instead of fir. Less tear out. We used to make some of them with an applied narrow moulding that covered the line of dados. I worked for a company that had a machine like Jack posted that was at least 80 years old and
starting to need work and took up a lot of space. They replaced it with a modern much smaller machine. Smaller was good
since only a couple of years after they bought it the plastic and aluminum shutters took over. When you have no work to
do....the smaller expensive machine is at least less in the way.

here a home made job that's small Mel

[Bruce Wrenn]

Why not do loose tenons instead of dowels? Build a horizontal slot mortiser for rails and plunge router jig for the stiles. Woodsmith / ShopNotes have done a couple of mortising jigs that you could use to both rails and stiles

[ed vitanovec]

Rockler has jigs to make these, you should take a look.