I had to go into work this morning so I didn’t get to work as much on my project as would have liked, but then on the other hand, I discovered once I did get started that I don’t have quite enough materials to go a lot further right now anyway. Now that is not to say there is nothing to do, mind you, but for the time being I am going to have to focus on building more gigs and fixtures rather than moving ahead onto the more fun stuff.
So today, I went back to my body mold and finished up on it. When we last looked at it, I had gotten the interior of it sanded to shape, but last night I trimmed the outside to some contours that will be more contusive to clamping, drilled some holes to accommodate my cello clamps, and glued on some 3/8” thick spacers to hold the mold off of the table. Today, I added two metal connecting bars to the top and the bottom to hold the two halves together. These I cut out of some scrap 3/16” thick steel I had downstairs, drilled holes through both them and the mold, and then bolted them together with some 1/4-20NC bolts, nuts and washers. Here is the finished product:
MISTAKE #2 - I should have accounted for the connecting bars before I ever cut out the mold shape in the first place. This would have done three things for me; first, the holes would have been easier to drill, second, I would have had the holes in the mold in exactly the correct locations with respect to the bars and, third, it would have helped me to preserve the shape of the mold when I cut the mold in half. This is last one is because you want to take the kerf of the saw blade (the thickness of the wood lost due to a saw cut) into account when bolting them back together. As it ended up, I had to estimate the kerf, make some concessions on hole diameters when tightening it up and, finally, leave out a couple of bolts because the holes didn't line up.
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