Day 77 through 79 - Shoulder slat fitting and positioning

It's been quite a while since my last entry, mainly because I just spent a week in beautiful Puerto Vallarta!  My first time spending more than just a few hours in Mexico.  Had the best margaritas of my life, brought back many bottles of tequila.

Alright, what have I been doing that would be of interest to this diary?  Oh, yes.  I was in the middle of making slats.

I cut out a single prototype slat and slid it all the way round the shoulders so that I could find the widest area between the beveled sections.  The reasoning for this was that I wanted to make all of the slats follow this template, and then I could trim each one down as necessary (easier to trim off than to add on).  I used the scroll saw to cut them all out of my HDF board, running each one alone a clamped piece of HDF to keep the lines as straight as possible.  After awhile, the task was complete, and I had 36 slat sides cut out.

Next task was to glue them all onto the slats I had previously cut out.  I hadn't used the router to make a rebate cut like I had done with my gunbox assembly; instead, I just slapped them directly onto each of the slats' sides using a good amount of Liquid Nails.  This process took a little more than a day since I ran out of clamps.  To hide the seam on the slat fronts, I'll just skim some Bondo on there and sand it down.

Once they were all assembled and dry, I trimmed the excess lengths of HDF using the chop saw.  I positioned some of the slats against the shoulders to see how everything lined up and what the eventual trimming would have to be.  Using a combination of the Dremel tool and my bandsaw (mounted upside-down on my stool), I trimmed and sawed a few of the slats.

I decided that I wanted to attach the center back slat first, so that I would have a reference point relative to where the other slats would be located.  I temporarily taped the rest of the slats onto the shoulders using my best guess as to their position.

Using a calculator, I added up the distance between each slat (from the two small ones in the front all the way to the back center slat) and divided that number by 8 (the number of gaps).  The answer was 4.015cm, so I re-taped all the slats so that they were 4cm from each other.

I drilled a hole into the shoulders for each slat's top bolt, and temporarily held them into place with a loose machine screw.  The tape I then recycled to make a barrier between the slat edges and the shoulders for when I would later apply Bondo to fill in the gaps.  I proceeded to take each of the positioned slats off one-at-a-time, and trimmed it with the Dremel and belt sander to make sure it fit into its own unique place on the bend of the shoulders.  As I re-attached each slat, I drilled the lower hole, and then bolted them securely into place, placing a nut on the inside of the shoulders.

Next up was to mix up some batches of Bondo and fill in the gaps, and that's currently curing as I type.

Oh, also over the last few days, I've been gluing a few of the hemis at a time, and I FINALLY got them all completed.  What a menial part of this build!  I should probably drill some holes in the skirt to position these puppies, soon.