Got some time again on Sunday and a little yesterday. Decided to tackle the base as I would like to be able to start assembling the lower half soon. I bought some casters from Penn-Elcom as they were rated to handle a heavy load. The metal frame on them is 3.25” so I was grappling in the design phase on how I would mount them. I came across 3.5” redwood while looking around home depot and thought it would be perfect so I grabbed the default 10ft. piece:
I thought this would also help to add weight to the base to lower the center of gravity…just in case.
My usual techniques failed as a jig saw cannot cut through as the blade starts to bounce on the wood it’s not able to cut on the downstroke, started to get unruly. I had borrowed a co-workers very basic circular saw with a very old blade and figured screw it:
Cuts didn’t come out too bad:
But the blade wasn’t long enough to make the cut on one or even two goes, so I had to repeat the above on all 4 sides. Got me my rough cut and then it was off to routing for a smooth edge……errr:
As you can tell I could have really used a good table saw or circular saw as it became a pain in the ass to cut, lower, cut, lower, flip, change bit, cut, raise, cut raise. Doing this for 4 pieces and 2 sides each translated to the better part of the morning/afternoon. I did get my dimensions right and did have clean surfaces so that’s a plus:
Next was routing out the necessary areas to fit the castor. I struggled with this for awhile as it took quite a long time drawing circles for me to realize that the caster frame wasn't actually a circle but was straight near the edges. So as I was short on time and because I wanted to get something done and this wasn’t going to be something anyone would see I decided to trace the outline as best as possible and freehand a template. Didn’t come out too bad:
Placed the template on top of the piece:
which presented an issue setting up a stable cut, so this was the best I could come up with:
Could really have used a nice vice, but this worked:
Routed the other piece:
Was pumped to put it together:
Dooohh!!
Oh yeah it has bolts, duh.
Cut some more out free hand and finally got what I was looking for:
That’s was far as I could get before the clock ran out. One thing I’ve noticed is that the redwood is softer and is more easily dented, and chips easier when routing. Overall I think it will work well but I don’t think I would use it for anything that you would have visible on the outside of a cab.