Let me preface this by saying a I'm a perfectionist....this can be both a blessing and a curse, but I'm hoping some of the more experienced builders here can tell me when I'm going a bit overboard or when my pursuit of perfection really is justified.
I started assembling the base. Should be pretty simple right? Well my pursuit of perfection doesn't agree with me.
Alright here are my objectives:
I need to make the cross members square in these two ways:
And also I need the height of all the cross members to be equal so that the mdf spoil board will sit flat across all pieces:
I assume there can be a little bit of error here since the spoilboard will ultimately be resurfaced..but having these pieces significantly off wouldn't be a good thing.
Now for this kit Ahren has opted to forgo using the 90 degree brackets that are in the e-drawings on their website in favor of directly attaching the ends of the cross members to the slots in the extrusion. This is accomplished by drilling access holes in the x-axis extrusions. My pictures will do a better job explaining:
With the button head cap screws on the ends of the cross members:
Now as far as stability of attachment, this seems to be perfectly strong enough to hold the base together....but I do find it a bit cumbersome to perfectly align things this way. I'm not sure if having the 90 degree brackets would alleviate some of my headaches or not. Next post I'll go into the issues I'm having.