I haven’t spent much time in the garage lately, mostly because I made a huge mistake. Remember how I had some alignment issues that I thought were purely aesthetic? It turned out to not be so. When I tried to set the large panel that would serve as the horizontal base of the crib, I found out that it wouldn’t fit, because the panels inside the base weren’t set at the same height as one another. Given I had already glued everything up, this meant that I had to break it apart, buy some more wood, and start over.
I haven’t had to completely start over, as many of the pieces I cut were unused to this point. Thankfully, I was able to salvage a couple of the larger parts from the deconstruction to be reused. Nothing was reuseable in place, but I was able to cut some of the smaller parts from the larger “scrap” pieces I now had.
One advantage to having to do this a second time is I already know how the first couple of steps are supposed to go – which allows me to move a little faster through the assemblies. Another nicety of this assembly is getting to use my new Jet parallet clamps on the end assemblies:
I’ve now come to realize that you don’t fully understand the lack of clamping pressure you had on a previous assembly until you have the clamping ability you actually need. Getting any kind of proper clamping was a stretch (pun intended) for the long axis of the crib base. I have two Craftsman ratcheting band clamps that I was able to fit around the whole base, but just barely. The straps are so taut that they vibrate like a stringed instrument. I should take my guitar tuner out there and see what pitch they hit.
Now that I’ve made sure the horizontal base will fit and sit level, I can move onto assembling the crib rails next.
I did bring my guitar tuner out to the garage. Unfortunately, the sound was a few octaves too low to register on the device – so I still don’ tknow the pitch.