Stuck in the middle with you

ABS laminated plywood

Last night I "finished" the first panel: got the ABS laminate glued onto the plywood for the case bottom!  It's currently sitting in my garage with about six and a half hours left to go before the adhesive has cured enough and I can remove the weight from on top of it.

These sandbags had some pressing matters to attend to

One of the casterboards needed a little touch-up paint around the edges, so I masked off the top of the board (which doesn't need to be painted, and it wouldn't hurt to have paint on, but I'm an OCD perfectionist) and gave it a couple more blasts.

The other casterboard however looked good enough that I fished out two casters from my parts box, and bolted them on.

The casters got a little physically attached to my casterboard - Ha cha cha cha cha!

This was a touch premature, however.  I mostly did it for my own edification, as I'm going to remove the casters from the board, and drill two sunken holes under where the casters go to install the bolts that will attach the caster boards to the bottom of the case.  A third bolt for each casterboard will be installed in the dead center of the boards for additional support.

My reasons for doing this, as opposed to just installing bolts on the surface of the board are as follows: as you can see in the pictures, the space between the casters is not enough to install three bolts.  Two would be a stretch, and the load for them really shouldn't be that far in towards the center.  Putting a bolt each under the caster mounting plates in sunken holes, and then a third bolt in the middle of the board will ensure that it has enough support, and also make the board look that much nicer.

Ready to roll!

The only concern I have is that having the bolts that hold the casterboard to the case bottom be directly in center with the casters might mean that any traumatic force applied to the casters/casterboards might transfer directly up the bolts that are in the bottom of the case and result in damages to the case bottom, which would essentially defeat the purpose of the casterboards entirely.  They are installed primarily to provide a smaller point of failure should anything happen to any of the casters, instead of that damage applying to something much harder to replace, like the bottom of the case.

The only alternative is to install two bolts almost next to the casters, and hope that the sheer forces of anything damaging would not compromise the case bottom.

I made a slight mistake when cutting the first piece of ABS laminate off the roll: I cut with the textured side down.  This is fine, and didn't mess up anything, but the recommendation is that you cut with the textured side facing up, so that the blade of your safety knife won't tend to wander from the line you are cutting.  I ended up using my straight-edge guide to make the cuts anyways, so it was no big deal.

Shiny plastic!

I didn't have access to enough cardboard at the time to lay out on the driveway to protect the entire roll, and even when I OCD sweep the hell out of my driveway, there is still enough shmutz on the ground that I didn't want the side that would have glue applied to it getting all crudded up from the ground.  I'm probably going to make all future cuts with the excess of the roll hanging off my work table, and cut it on the table with some cardboard underneath.

Adhesive getting all tack-ified

When I sprayed the plastic with adhesive, I think my pattern was a little too tight.  I can probably spray from a little higher up and not use quite so much, otherwise I'll run through my glue before I am finished.

There wasn't really enough light out to take a picture of the wood, and the flash on my phone wasn't enough to make the glue really visible on it, so I don't have a picture here.  But basically, the glue adheres to itself strongly, so what you do is spray both pieces, let the glue tack up, and then sandwich them together.  Once that's done, you need to apply constant weight/pressure across the two halves so that the glue is able to cure over twenty four hours or so.

After I had set the panel up to be squashed for a day, I moved onto the final task for the evening: cutting another set of tongue and groove rails for one of the sides.  At this point, I have half of the tongue and groove extrusions cut out for the lid.  The new blade on the hacksaw meant it took me only a fraction of time to get these two pieces cut and ready.

This image is rated R

Tonight I need to address cutting the lid side panels (a task I keep putting off), and after checking the bottom panel to see how the laminate is doing on the surface, I may start drilling out rivet holes and begin riveting the rails to the bottom of the case.  The sooner I do that, the sooner I can work on getting the mounting holes for the casterboards drilled into the bottom of the case, and the sooner I can undertake an important but CRUCIAL task: making sure that the case WITH casters on will be able to be loaded and unloaded from my trunk, or if I will need to trim down the side walls to add extra clearance.  Exactly HOW I will do that is a topic for a future post!

What progress looks like