Starting on bulkheads

Our cat Mogget is fascinated by the whole woodworking gig. He likes to be involved as much as possible, except when I turn the vacuum cleaner on. He gets quite enthusiastic at times, to the point of rolling in the wood shavings.

Here he is supervising cutting of some of the lightening holes in the spine. I'm using a circle jig on my router to do this, as it's of a size where that's doable.

I built the 6mm bits of bulkheads 1, 2, and 3, and slotted them into place on the spine. Here's bulkheads 1 and 2 on the spine. You can also see my lovely little home-brew speakers in the background, playing lots of really crappy eighties music:

Then I went to work on doublers. John's plan is very economical with plywood. The doublers are all made from multiple pieces, so you can make use of offcuts wherever possible. I decided that was fiddly, so I'm wasting plywood with impunity. Hence the doubler on bulkhead 1. The process I've settled on is to cut everything oversize by about 4-5mm with the jigsaw, then use the router to finish the cut. When it's a straight line I can use some timber to cut against. Ditto when it's a circle of appropriate size for my circle jig. Often it isn't though, so I just work these bits by hand with the router.

I'm not sure Mogget agrees with my wastage of ply.

Here's a close up of bulkhead 2 with it's doubler on top. The bulkhead itself is 6mm ply, the doubler is 9mm. The doubler is quite light.

It certainly becomes three dimensional quickly.

And one quick view of the model, this time showing the whole lot so far: