Plantation Shutter Progress

[Tim Malyszko]

In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about plantation shutters. I just started on making some for our house yesterday and figured I would document my progress along the way for anyone else that's venturing into plantation shutters.

The louvers will be made from basswood while all the other components will be made from poplar (purchased from creeker Tom Sontag at Lumber Logs).

My first set of plantation shutters will be made for the following window, which measures 42 1/4" W x 52 5/8" H. For comparisons sake, bids to make a plantation shutter out of "premium hardwoods" to fit this window ranged from $389 to $597 depending on the grade of wood.



On Saturday, I got as far as milling the Louvers. I started off with a 98.5" x 22" board of 5/4 Basswood.


I first ripped the rough sawn basswood into 3"x40" strips on the tablesaw, jointed and planed them to 1-1/8" thick and then ripped them to 2.5" wide, which is the size of louver I was planning on using.



I then resawed each louver board in half, yielding 2 louver blanks from each board.


I then planed the blanks to their final thickness - 3/8".


Creating the elliptical profile was by far the trickiest part and involved a lot of trial and error until I found the optimal setup. Since I owned all the router bit profiles in the woodline set except for the louver provile, I did some searching and found a similar shutter profile from Eagle America (http://eagleamerica.com/architectura...rs/p/174-2805/ Profile O). The bit was expensive at $55, but I am a believer in spending my money on high quality router bits. It however was still cheaper than buying the woodline plantation shutter set.

Here are some pictures of my final setup:






In order to get a smooth, consistent cut, I had to shim the featherboard so that it would make direct contact in the flat, middle of the louver blank; otherwise, the blank would rock as it was fed though the router, leaving a very inconsistent cut. In addition, finding the optimal fence position was tricky. If the blank rode on the bit's bearing, the louver would come out less than 1/4" thick, but if the bit was recessed too far, I didn't get a good elliptical profile and wound up with simple, rounded over edges. Also, I would suggest not using a small router for this operation because it was nearly impossible to make these in 2 passes and get consistent results. The featherboards were really the key and using a caul to hold the featherboard in place was ideal since it gave me the ability to easily adjust the featherboard's tension as I rotated the blank to make the passes on each side.

Here is the order in which I cut each blank - Side A, then side B, followed by C or D.



By the time I finished the louvers, I wound up with approximately 98 linear feet of 2 3/8" wide by 3/8" thick elliptical louvers. I only need 75 or so linear feet for this first window, so I will have plenty of stock to start another window.

Here are a few pictures of the louvers:





From beginning to end, the milling took approximately 4 hours. When it is all said and done, I estimate that the wood for these shutters should only cost me less than $70 and the hardware/paint another $50 or so - a significant cost savings over the custom plantation shutter quotes.

On the next set of louvers, I plan on making a few changes:

• Rip the rough stock into 6" strips instead of 3" strips, to save time on the jointing, planing and resawing.
• Use 4/4 stock instead of 5/4 stock. I ended up wasting a lot of material and could have achieved the same results using 4/4 stock.
• Cut the blanks longer than 40" - each louver blank has about 1.5" of snipe on each end from the router. I tried shimming the outfeed fence, but could not get good results, so the snipe is something I have to live with. I found 40" blanks very managable and could have easily handled longer blanks. Going with the longer blanks will cut down on wasted material due to snipe.
• Make the louver blanks 2 5/8" wide since I lose 1/8" on the blank when I pass it though the router table. This will yield a 2.5" wide louver instead of the 2 3/8" louver I ended up with.

As I continue to progress I'll update this thread.

Thanks for looking.