Monday, October 22, 2012

Finishing off the beams

First order of business tonight was to get the belt sander running again. I stopped at a local tool supply place this morning and picked up a new power cord.


What I learned in this is that it wasn't necessary to take the side cover off the sander. You can do the whole thing inside the handle. Oh well. If I ever have to do it again, next time I'll know. After an hour or so of messing around, its as good as new:


From there, I took the deck beams and sanded them smooth, taking off the epoxy squeeze-out and evening off the laminations. What I found in the process of gluing those up it is all but impossible to keep the various layers perfectly lined up. They all wanted to slide around a tad. In the end, they were off by a smidge (like maybe 1/32"). No problem. The belt sander made quick work of evening them out.


Those came out really nice. The spring-back from the jig seems to be pretty much identical on each of them, so they should lay out on the deck very well.

Oh, and be careful with the sander:


(That looks worse than it is...)

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