Gluing Top Planks together

The next stage was to arrange and glue the top planks together and then the bottom planks. The planks all are about 10’ in length and you arrange them into how you would like to see your finished board. Grain had given me some nice timbers so I think mine turned out the best I could get with the cut woods given. The finished article will probably turn out much better when all sanded and varnished etc but I just can’t see it myself at the moment. From these photos you can't really see the true grains due to lighting, wet glue and probably poor camera shots. As you will also notice, an important device is the clamp. I still never had enough but just had to make do or come up with ideas. The bar clamps can run pricey, I got 4 of them costing about €30 each, ouch! and I had over 20 spring clamps, still not enough for some later stages.

Starting out to build one of these

A few things needed to be done before assembling the kit. Getting the room to do this was a small problem, with no outside shed or garage to work in, I could only use the attic, which luckily was all floored anyhow and at least I was out of the way. I needed to build up a Rocker Table to run at least the length of the board and about a few inches wider than it. With the rocker table now built, and clearance now made in the attic this would be where I will be spending many mid week nights and odd weekends. Sure there's nothing on TV anyhow. I also had no tools so my new now favourite store is B&Q, without their help I would be lost, and it was quite close to me so if I needed something I could just pop down quickly and back to the attic again. In these 2 pics you will see the beginning of the rocker table and then the finished rocker table with the fishbone framework put together on top so that it gives me an idea where I needed each cross member to be so as to support the frame later when gluing the framework to the planks.