Curved timber windows

It has been a while since the last post, but we have been pretty busy and slowly getting things done on the house. We finished the first window months ago and are pretty happy with how it came out. Well it's almost finished, we still have to get the window latch and then coat it in something (most likely some natural oil finish).

So as you can see from the pictures the glass follows the outside curve, this has two advantages. The first is that the curved wall does not look odd the glass is only slightly offset in from the wall so we don't end up getting what would look like a chunk of wall missing from certain angles. The other advantage is that we end up with a really nice ledge on the inside to put things like ornaments and dust.

When we decided that we were going to make the windows and doors ourselves I decided that we needed a new tool to make the job easier. I was initially thinking of a biscuit cutter (good for edge joining) or a dowel joiner. This was when I came across the Festool Domino XL, it is basically a dowel joiner but on steroids. It is a reasonably expensive tool(the most expensive that I own now) but it is so well made and is so easy to use that it is worth every dollar. The XL is the larger of two models offered by Festool, and is able to make a domino hole 14mm x ~30mm x 70mm deep. Which is big enough to use in the construction of solid timber doors. Here are some photos of it in action:

This is cutting holes in the top and bottom of the window. The Domino XL makes it really easy to line up the holes which are also cut into the side pieces. In the picture below you can see one of the guides that is used to align the holes.

I also made a special jig so that I can align the tool correctly to cut the holes for the middle two columns that holds the center glass piece.It is setup to align the posts with the curved edge.

I used long pieces of all thread to clamp the window together while the glue dried. I bought some nice solid stainless steel hinges to hang the window panes from, I was a bit surprised at how bad most of the hinges I found were though.

The only issue we have had is the company we bought the glass from has gone out of business so now we have to find a new local supplier. We have also made frames for two doors which just need glazing and fitted two door frames.