Day 4 - Beginning assembly of the skirt

(Originally posted on July 9th, 2013)

Today after work, I was very much looking forward to assembling all the various bits and bobs (I love that phrase) that I'd cut out to date.

So, I had mentioned in my previous entry that I wanted to reinforce the flimsy struts that I had put on the other day.  After work, I drove yet again to the hardware store (where I think I'll be spending a lot of my time and money) and bought some reinforcing L-bracket-y things.

The screws that came with them were too long for the width of the plywood, so I took a bit of scrap HDF board, cut it to size, and added that to the bracket.

After I did this to the two side struts and back strut, I realized that I hadn't necessarily made them 90°, perpendicular to the skirt base.  Ah well, I thought, it will all sort itself out.  After all, these are temporary struts.

Then proceeded a really frustrating experience where I didn't know how the heck to make everything line up in three dimensions.  I couldn't trust the strut height if the 90° angle was off, and when I tried to place the skirt top, the struts tops were not necessarily in the locations I needed them to be to sit the top onto.

Again, taking a cue from Adam S's diary, I hopped into the car to the local thrift shop to locate a stool that I could cut to size on which I could place the skirt top.  And, luckily, I found one!  For cheap!  I trimmed it, but accidentally took 2.2cm off of it instead of 1.1cm.  I forgot that I only needed to account for the width one of the pieces of plywood, not both.  Ah well, I sat a wide scrap piece of plywood on top of the stool to correct for it.  Not the end of the world.

I proceeded to hammer temporary brad nails into the struts.  Once the back and sides were done, I started on the front strut.

Now came the moment of truth.  Remember when I said I'm terrible at math?  Well, the center strut might need to be recut.  The top and bottom of that strut are not parallel with each other, and it's affecting the overall balance of the whole skirt.  I had a hard time getting it to stop slipping this way and that, because it was too short and too angled.  I'll take my yardstick and measure the hypotenuse again later this week and see what I can do to correct it.  In the meantime, I used another scrap of HDF to correct for my blunder and temporarily nailed the thing in there anyway. It goes against my perfectionist nature, but sometimes you just have to say "meh".

Now, for the exciting part!  Once the struts were in there, I figured that the HDF panels were going to do most of the angular correction for me, and I was kind of right!  I placed panel 6 on the back, and panels 4 and 4b on the sides, affixing them with temporary brad nails.  I was very impressed with the results.  I overcut the panels a bit to try to account for my (terrible) jigsaw skills so that I could cut and/or sand them down later.  But overall, I'm really pleased with the results.

Next up on the docket: I need to account for the angular placement of the panels, sanding away a bit of the skirt base and top.  I know that I need to bevel the edges of the panels themselves, but it escaped my mind that I would need to do that for the plywood.  I'll try to figure out something.

I won't be doing much tomorrow; evening already taken by another project of mine: recording some voice acting for a video game I'm in!  Exciting, yet different, stuff altogether.

Keep building, be happy, and most important of all: EXTERMINATE!

Materials:
5 - 1 1/2" corner brackets (4-piece): $13.35
1 - 1.75oz box 1 1/4" wire nails: $1.30
1 - wooden stool: $7.60
Total: $22.25

Total to date: $394.59