Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Day 24 and 25 - Shoulder panels redux

(Originally posted on August 18th, 2013)

Where did we leave off?  Oh yes.  I had just glued half of the back panel onto the shoulders.  Now, remember I said I was afraid of the panel launching right off when I removed the clamps?  Well, that didn't happen.  But to make sure, I removed one clamp at a time, drilled a countersunk hole into the HDF and plywood, and screwed in a wood screw.  When I was done, that puppy wasn't going anywhere.

I proceeded to glue the other half of the panel onto the frame.  Nothing too harrowing to report here; much the same thing as last time, except everything lined up a bit better.

Once that dried, I screwed it into place as well, but this time I took all the clamps off first, instead of one-at-a-time.

I marked a line on the sides where I wanted to trim the excess HDF to make room for the eventual overlap of the front panel.  When I went to cut it with my hacksaw, though, I found that the saw was a bit too small.  I decided to route it off instead with the Dremel tool and line-cutter attachment.  Well, it didn't quite work that well; the line guide kept catching on the board I was using, and the line wound up being pretty raggedy.

I tore off the excess (part of it was slightly glued, not intentionally, so I had to file that down a bit), and switched tactics for the other side.  This time, I just dragged a pair of scissors across the pencil-line over and over again until I could tear off the excess bit.  Can't find my box-cutter, and man, my arm got tired.


As I was trimming the excess HDF, I had the front panel taking a soak in the bathtub.  After about an hour, I took it downstairs and clamped it all into place.  One thing I hadn't accounted for, however, was that none of my clamps were wide enough for how I had cut the bottom shoulder hole.  I had to take a quick trip to Lowe's to get larger clamps, six of them (hey, they had a two-for-one sale, and I bought them out).

I let that dry overnight, and today I just finished gluing and clamping it all in place.  I had enough clamps this ti
me round to do the whole thing instead of just one half at a time.

One thing I noticed that I'm feeling a bit irked by, however, is that I don't think the sides of the shoulders have the same angle when looked at face-on.  The right side looks a little more slanted than the left. Before I glued the front panel on, I checked the front strut, and discovered that it wasn't exactly square with the shoulder bottom.  I hadn't glued it on the bottom (had forgotten), so I re-positioned the strut until it was square, since I want to use it to align the gunboxes.  Once it was in position, I glued and nailed it into its new place.  I'll need to take into consideration the amount I moved it (something like 5mm) when I make the gunboxes.


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