The day started as the last one, fixing the broken tools.
We opened up the oscillating spindle sander and took apart the drive assembly. This was a bit of a pain. Everything is expectedly tight in there, so it was hard to get everything together in the right way. Looking up videos, etc online was also difficult because we were replacing a “belt”. But there is also a “belt” sander made by Ryobi. So the google search results kept getting confused about what we were looking for.
But we got it together, fired it up and it worked! I had a moment of a panic when it started making a squeaking/chirping noise. But it turns out, the sander just really likes to be perfectly level. We re-installed a base on it and we were back in business.
At that point, we could get back to work on the tower. I started by smoothing out the curves on the curved pieces. No problems there. After that, my father showed a different, half-way approach on the table router. You can put a peg in the table, and anchor off the peg to keep the piece stable as you run it down the router. This was… a bit of a pain actually. It works against the router bit, but it’s pretty rough when you’re moving with the bit. You have to flip the piece around and run it the wrong way to get the entire length while it’s still on the peg. But in the end, it’s good enough for this project. Nothing a little sanding won’t fix.
From this point, we started laying things out for the joinery, marking all the pieces, and then using a jig to drill the holes for the dowels in the permanently attached sides. That’s a lot of holes, but the jig really made it easy.
Unfortunately, the 3/8ths dowels that we had were quite old, and had swelled a bit in the Houston humidity over the last, say, 20 years. We headed over to Rocklers to get some new ones after lunch. It was a long trip, which ate up a lot of the day. The employees were very helpful there, but they apparently handed us the wrong bag of dowels. (It may have been hung on the wrong peg.) So we discovered after the long trip that we had 7/16ths dowels that were definitely too big. Sigh.
That was the end of another day. At least we didn’t break any tools.
I’m headed to a different Rocklers in town to swap out the dowels (and also get some smaller screws for the knock down joins) on Tuesday. Then maybe strike back up, assembling the tower on Wednesday?