Anybody ever make their own blinds

Re: Anybody ever make their own blinds

Keith Newton

No but I have a similar problem at my weekend retreat, with a pentagonal window in my Western facing wall. I’m thinking I’ll do a pleated curtain that will rest on the sill, and draw up with some cordage led down from the peak with cheek blocks to a cleat between the lower windows. There will need to be a batten across between the top of the vertical sides to hold those corners out.

Re: Anybody ever make their own blinds

William Duffield

Here is a youtube video of a guy who made his own wooden vertical blinds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwY2MN5VD8E&t=69s

He has a link to the same build in words and still pics.

I see several things I don't like about it, mainly the weight, but it might be a starting place. There is another, general issue with this project and most vertical blinds. Their design doesn't address windows that are trapezoidal, especially ones with a non-horizontal top.

I wonder if I could make them upside

Mike L

down. That way they would all just stand straight up and can be cut to different length. Hum.

Not sure who that was in the video, but almost everything he was using was made of wood or had wood attached

John Heisz....

David Weaver

.the video maker is kind of a gimmick video maker.

It's the "something for nothing" gimmick on youtube where he makes a lot of videos about using self made or fairly plain tools.

The point of the making is the video and not the stuff made, so you have to be aware of that. It's more or less entertainment but there's some substance to it. I like these kind of gimmick channels, just classifying them as something vastly different than Curtis Buchanan's video series about making chairs.

I'll post a separate reply about making blinds because it's doable, but there's a huge penalty for impatience.....I don't want it to get lost at the end of this message.

Consideration if you're going to make ..

David Weaver

..your own. Most of these blinds have basswood slats or something very light, as the blinds will get heavy really quickly if you use something else

I don't know what they do to stabilize the slats, but if you're going to attempt to make these blinds, you'd probably want to have good power tools and a decent drum sander at the very least so that the slats are neatly done.

If you have that, the next order of business is making some test slats and letting them sit around for a few months hanging in strings to see how much they move around. When I was thinking about making some of my own (which turns out to be no cheaper than just ordering from blind sites who have mostly switched to having custom sized blinds made in mexico), I read post after post from folks who had used kiln dried wood, made blinds and then found that their slats moved seasonally in really unflattering ways (twisting).

I wouldn't be surprised if the slats on commercial blinds were heat pressed to really knock all of the life out of them.

The process reminds me of my first attempts at getting beech for planes. I finally found perfectly quartersawn wood that wasn't quite sawn perfectly pith on center. For about two years, the 8/4 stock that I'd purchased twisted and some split. Same thing with guitar necks - my second guitar neck was sawn by me out of a huge slab, as perfectly straight as I could make it. It still twisted a little, and since I only waited two weeks to see what it did, it slowly twisted after it was attached to a guitar.

Re: Anybody ever make their own blinds

roger lance

Norm Abram did make wooden blinds on an episode of New Yankee Workshop.

Thanks the LOML shot down the idea

Mike L

She was not as impressed as I was. I will figure out something or she will.