Hackin'

Got a late start today, what with the Palm Sunday and lunch with the family, and then working on stuff around the house.  It was a great morning and early afternoon, but I was still eager to resume where I left off.

One of the last things I did yesterday was begin marking and cutting the aluminum extrusion rails.  That was primarily what I worked on today for the few hours I was able to devote to being out in the "shop."

Mitre box with aluminum rail

Cutting these damn things requires a serious amount of elbow grease.  I've managed to get my cut time down to less than two minutes or so per cut, depending on how many times I switch hands.  My forearms are gonna be RIPPED by the time I am done with this project!

All in all, I need to cut the four double-angle extrusion rails into sixteen pieces, and the three hybrid tongue and groove extrusions will be cut into eight pieces.  I can't begin measuring out the tongue and groove sections until I am done cutting all of the double-angle rails, as they add to the total length of the piece since they stick out from the plywood walls a smidge.

Cut rails on panel

At this point, I have seven of the sixteen double-angle rails cut to size.  The piece on the left in this picture is representative of what the sides will look like after I cut the strip of plywood for the lid off the larger panel.  There will be an additional inch of rail along the side at the top.

The rails don't meet all the way at the corners for a number of reasons; I need less material by cutting shorter pieces that don't go all the way from corner to corner, and more importantly, the corners will be covered over with ball corners anyways.  Since those parts of the case will never be seen by human eyes, I don't really need to finish the corners and make them look all pretty.

Seven metal rails, all in a row

Of the sixteen pieces I need to cut, pictured here are two rails from along the front panel of the case, all four rails for the bottoms of the left and right side panels and the tops of the sides of the lid panels, and one vertical corner.  Slaving away with the hacksaw is really a bear - in order to keep the noise level down and not project the screeching sound of metal being sliced, I had to work with the garage door almost all the way closed.  With the sun glaring down, and no insulation in our detached garage, it already felt like an oven when I went out there to begin work.  A sweat rag is an absolute must.

Generally, cutting into the metal doesn't make too terrible a noise, but when I first start cutting into the uncut 6.5' rails, the ends tend to oscillate and make a really obnoxious shimmering noise.  This doesn't happen when I cut into smaller pieces, so I'll just have to be careful about what time of day it is whenever I start sawing into a new stick.

Shiny!

I think I have decided to go with 3" casters for the case - it just seems right.  While I could buy 3" casters from Reliable Hardware, I am toying with getting two sets of these 3" casters with brakes from Ikea:

RILL Locking 3" Casters

I know, I know.  Any serious builder would say "Don't buy your casters from Ikea."  I'm not terribly sure that I am going to get these yet, but I am gonna head up to our local Ikea after work on Tuesday to check them out and see if they meet my satisfaction.  Two sets of these casters would put me back only twenty bucks, as opposed to the nearly thirty that going up to 3" casters from Reliable Hardware would be.  As it is, I'm probably going to need to buy two cans of adhesive for the ABS laminate instead of just one, and the whole point of this endeavor is to keep my costs low.

Of course, if I buy these casters on Tuesday, that means I *could* have the caster boards completely finished by Thursday... ;-)