Installing the sides

I spent most of the Christmas break building the sides.

Here the perimeter frame of the sides is installed. As always they are glued with epoxy and fastened with deck screws.

In some cases the Southern Yellow Pine planking stock would be perfectly straight until I ripped it into square sections. Then it liked to acquire a twist and bend over time. Sometimes the twist was as much as 30 degrees per foot. Forcing the twist back in place was not an option as it would just introduce distortions to the structure. Here I let gravity and clamps to apply a counter torque to slowly untwist it over several days. Rain helped. I had mixed success with this.

I finally got enough good square stock to frame up the sides.

I clamped the side in place. At this point I made sure the back was perpendicular to the bottom. As it turns out the bottom rose up 1/8 inch in the front and back. This was a bit frustrating but at this point I have to live with it. Most of the middle section was straight so I aligned the bottom edge of the sheet of plywood with that. Then the back aligned with the back edge with the back.

Rather than do a lot of tedious and error prone measurements for hole placements I just put the plywood on the side and clamped it in place. I then marked it up against the frames. Next, I took it down and drilled lots of holes from the back. I applied glue and fastened it in place. There were no instances of screws sticking through.

Here the piece is permanently glued and fastened in place.

I did the remaining pieces for the sides in the same way. For the joint between the two bottom pieces I used a long butt block to make it stronger. The top two pieces lined up to a frame.

The wall is nearly finished. All that remains is to cut off the excess, patch screw holes, epoxy and paint.