With the feed tables finished, I was ready to start cutting the MDF for the torsion box down to size. I’d realized that there was no way that I could do the biggest of the cuts without a friend to help, so I had to wait for someone to free up.
Let the record show that Kristi made it before Anthony or Art.
I wish I’d gotten a photo of Kristi standing in the “catcher” position with all her safety gear on, but the memory will have to be enough. Too cute! 🙂
I set up for the 52″ wide cut for the table top pieces, ran off 2 boards, and then set up for the 4″ cuts. Since the entire grid (rafters, stringers, and end caps) will be 4″, I wanted to make sure that all those cuts got done without moving the fence. First up were 4 long rips, 8′ long. Once those were complete, I cut my assistant loose, and started ripping all the shorter pieces. That went fairly quickly, then I had to set up for 2 more big cuts, one to cut a 2′ piece for the bottom of the box, and one to free another 52″ piece for the top.
With some hemming and hawing about how long the table should be (I decided to go “only” 4″ over the desired length, because I have barely enough rollerchain to handle anything extra), I made what I hope will not be a critical decision; rather than having two equal sized 4′ pieces for the top, and one “of the proper width”, I decided to cut one of the 49″ pieces (MDF is sold 1″ oversized for some reason) down, so that I have 3 different lengths. The idea here is that random lengths mean that I won’t have seams lining up and causing weakness at particular points. I have no idea if this has structural merit, but there you go.
At the end of the work day, I had all the pieces cut out, but I still needed to chop the stringers down to length. I was getting tired and starting to make mistakes, so I decided to quit for the evening.