I Made a Portafilter Handle With a Twist
I made an oak handle for the portafilter that came with my new espresso machine. I don’t have or know how to use a lathe, and I don’t think I have the skills to have done a good job by just going at a block of wood with saws, chisels, and files, so I made it with a jig that sat on my table saw sled and allowed me to “precisely” rough out the handle shape as octagonal slices, and sanded the approximated handle shape smooth.
Design:
I drew up the basic handle shape on Inkscape (see picture below), and divided the shape into slices proportioned to be 1 blade width wide. Each slice would be Octagonal. To add interest to the shape each slice would be rotated 5 degrees. A picture below shows my 3D blender model for the roughed out handle.
Cutting the Roughed-Out Handle:
I cut the slices with my table saw sled and a jig that consisted of two octagonal blocks that I could fasten to the ends of the 2x2x6 block of oak that I made the handle out of (see picture below). I translated the design into a blade height and an angle. For each slice I adjusted the blade height (one turn on a delta contractor saw is ¼” in height, by marking my handle I was able to set the blade height with 1/128” precision), rotated the handle 5 degrees (measured with digital angle meter), and made a cut and rotated the jig 8 times. I then shifted the jig over one blade width, 3/32”, using a micro-adjustable stop consisting of a screw that happened to advance 3/64 per rotation screwed into a scrap piece of wood clamped to the sled fence. Then I would repeat. At the top end of the handle I increased the resolution of slices by only advancing ½ or ¼ of a blade width. In all with 8 cuts per slice and 57 slices I made 456 passes with the sled.
Smoothing and Finishing:
Making the smoothed out final shape without losing the twist turned out to be challenging. I eventually hit on using 1x 1.5” squares of120 grit sand paper wrapped on a 3/8” dowel that allowed me to sand between and up to twist edges without completely wiping out the edges. I probably spent 4-5 hours sanding. When the shape was pretty smooth, I did passes with 180, 220, and 400 grit, and finished with Rubio Monocoat Pure.