On top of that I thumb tacked some waxed paper. This allows me to build the trusses of the bridge right over the drawing ensuring exact alignment of the pieces. The waxed paper protects the drawing from becoming one with the trusses. I used ordinary straight dressmakers pins to hold the pieces of wood in alignment to the drawing. Once I had everything assembled dry, I removed the pieces of wood but not the pins and began gluing up. This way, the pins would allow me to assemble the trusses exactly as I had laid them out dry. Once one side was complete I simply replaced the waxed paper with fresh and laid out the other side exactly as the first.
The rest of the assembly was fairly straightforward. The only tricky part was constructing the lateral braces. The instructions indicated that these could be either lap jointed to form an X or could be made with three pieces. I tried the three-piece method but had trouble getting proper alignment so I tried the lap joint method. You know you have reached a pinnacle of modeling when you can put together two sixteenth of an inch square pieces together with a lap joint. Using my optivisor and a strong lamp the work went quite easily. I used the same method I was taught way back in shop in high school. I simply scored the wood about half way down with an exacto knife on either side of the notch and then a few more times in between and then knocked out the waste. With a little trimming up with the exacto knife, a smooth square and even notch was easy to make. I repeated this for the corresponding piece and soon found that if I was careful with the width of the notch I could make both pieces snap together and hold without glue. |