Small update on the carriage here...
Okay, well, I say small... a fair chunk of work spread over a couple of days that has required a fair amount of actual work!
It all started with myself taking an impromptu drive up to the local timber merchant to see if I could get my hands on an offcut of an 18mm thick plyboard. In typical fashion when I entered the office, the same chap that we managed to 'butter up' to get a nice little offcut for the up-and-coming LAT was behind the desk and I am greeted with "Oh, what do you want". (in a joking way of course).
All I needed was a bit that was approximately 30cm wide by 60cm tall. Sadly, the 'offcut' he had was much bigger than that at 70cm square. Oh... "It's alright mate, I can chop you off a bit from this piece but, I will have to charge you a cut fee," he says. Well, long story short, to get the wanted cut-down slice, was nearly as much as the 70cm3 piece so, that's what we went with. With wood in hand, I made my way over to the little workshop with the larger than needed cut of 18mm ply.
We set to work rather quickly with setting up the circular rip saw... pushing it to the limits (as we often do with most tasks, using tools to the limit of what they should and should not do), to cut out our end and middle parts of the carriage.
Due to the nature of using a big boy power tool, sadly not much in the way of photographic evidence of our heroic efforts to cut down the three individual parts. However, here are the after-shot (s) of the three said bits.
As you can see here, they are all marked up and ready for the next steps which involved us using a jigsaw to cut off the rather lovely curved edges, central half-circle, and coupling/drawbar hole? if that is what we are calling that?
As I said previously, using tools up to the very limit, whilst we found that the blade has a mind of its own, dancing all about going anywhere but in a straight line, it worked surprisingly well.
After letting dad have the first go, it was only fair that I took over and carried on, taking care to not let the blade go off the path too much. We both agreed that really, this was way too thick to do this but, sometimes working with what you have got, can still work, and is very in fitting with what we are trying to achieve here. something totally unique without breaking the bank and more importantly, making something from nothing and spending quality time together. "Living the dream" for want of a better word.
Yeah, that was not too fun but, we can smooth that up after.
Never the less, all three 'tricky bits' were cut out, all be it rather roughly.
We left it there for another day, as always, time seems to run away from you, and only just as progress seems to be moving, you realize that time has all but run out.
Skip forward a day or two, right back into it with cutting down the sides and shaving out and smoothing the cut edges.
Of course this time, I had the boy with me and our little helper can be seen here helping to file it all down straight and smooth. All the while helping Grandad out by eating some of his small red pot of bacon crisps. Good lad.
This is where we left off a couple of days ago, and some more have been done today to 'finish them off' today. I will update you on today's efforts shortly.
Cheers,
Rich
