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Testing…

Finished the last of the crossbars today, checked the fit and fettled a bit, and then thought I’d try test-assembling the base…

That’s the bending jig; it was MDF so I considered it disposable (I must recover the screws from it now that I think about it). And the light was just going, hence the odd lighting. This really is too large to assemble on the bench; I’ll have to assemble it on this. It’s worse for wear thanks to moisture, but pffft. It’s MDF. It’s for the bin anyways.

Mental note, next time do this in daylight; can you see the deliberate error? 😀 I put the top bar at the end closest to the camera in upside down by mistake and got almost an inch of misalignment at the top, which gave me a moment’s pause until I figured out what I’d done.… Read the rest

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In the shed, nobody can hear you scream

So, job one, get the end crossbars in place. Time to chop some mortices with damn near no margin for error at all…

The new mortices for the end panel are within a millimeter of the other mortices for the side panels. In one case, there’s an actual small breakthrough.

But it held and that’s one down. Then on to chopping mortices in the steambent upright, which is equally stressful because if you stuff it up, it’s a lot of repair work.

Awkward to chop too. There was a bit of spokeshave work before this, I figured do that before cutting holes in the thing…

The holdfasts really do make this a lot easier.

Then assembly and fettling…

Ah, feck. Can you see the problem?

Yeah, I’m going to have to rethink how the crossbar at the top attaches here.… Read the rest

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Awkwardness

Back’s finally better enough to tackle the now ridiculous buildup of wood shavings in the shed…

Three bags full of the stuff in total, stuffed behind the bench, under the bench, all over the floor, in between the boards, everywhere. Of course, just because you get rid of the rubbish doesn’t mean that things stop being awkward…

Job one was to cut that plywood down to size so I could at least get into the shed again 😀 It’s to be the base for the drawer – I realised that the cedar of lebanon I had for that was not cedar of lebanon but western red cedar. Whoops. Oh well, better to find out now…

Then on to the front panel, which went quite quickly (so much faster doing this stuff with a template).… Read the rest

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