Handy Tools – Octagonal Guillotine

While building my octagonal box for the swap, I wanted to put some banding around the top of the box. This would mean cutting the ends of the banding at 67.5 degrees (90 – 22.5), and I figured I was unlikely to get that uniform with a saw (at least not without a nice miter box, which wasn't in the budget at the time), so I built a guillotine for cutting that angle. I used a couple scraps from around the shop, a hinge from the hardware store, and the blade from a utility knife.

Octagonal guillotine, closed, showing the mounting for the utility blade knife

Octagonal guillotine, opened, showing the stop block to get the correct angle in the edge banding

The results were good enough that I used them on the top of my box straight off the guillotine.

Three scrap pieces of edge-banding, cut to make an octagonal corner

It's a useful tool, and now hangs on the wall, waiting for my next octagonal project. I've since made a similar guillotine for cutting edge-banding for a hexagonal box. For some reason, I haven't yet made one for plain-old rectangular corners, though. Huh!

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