I was eager to get going on building the wing stand this evening, and I had a few helpers that could lend me their hands! It turns out I accidentally left the “towers” at Finn’s so I could only build the base. It worked out fine as I don’t think we could have gotten through much more this evening. First things first, feed the boys while I unload the car!
It turns out these 8020 pieces are so heavy, I needed Jack’s help getting the longer pieces out. We laid them on the ground in the basic layout we intended to assemble. The idea was to get the base completed this evening. This meant all the corner braces installed, and caster holes drilled and casters installed. While the boys worked on pre-attaching the bolts and nutplates to the parts, I worked on drilling holes in the corner plates for for the casters.
Next step was to piece all the corners together using the pre-assembled bracing parts. It was a little bit of a dance and/or wrestling match to get them all to fit together, but perseverance paid off, and we eventually got everything pieced together. The bracing is more than adequate to hold a fairly square foundation for the towers, but we used a drywall square and measured corner to corner to ensure we were tight. Our measurements put the corner to corner measurements to be within 1/16″ of each other. Once we confirmed square, we tightened down all the bolts to lock in the dimensions
Lastly it was time to install the casters using the pre-drilled holes and….. and…. ugh! I was sloppy with the positioning, and it turns out the outer holes were not far enough inside the corner to clear the underlying 8020. Shoot! I think I even thought in my head during drilling that I should probably check clearances. No matter…. It was getting late so we decided to call it a day, and I can re-drill tomorrow. Hopefully I can do it with a hand drill, otherwise I’ll remove those plates and do it on the drill press. After taht realization, we decided it was time to wrap up for the evening, and enjoy the success of building out the frame of the base. I’ll get those casters on tomorrow morning hopefully.
1 comment
What a team. Nice work