Magnum Opus

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and
despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck,
boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822),

It occurred to me today that should some ill befall me, like llama falling on me from a great height, or sudden incarceration in Guantanamo Bay, there would be no one to continue on my great work for the benefit of all mankind.

Normally, you would expect a son to continue in his fathers footsteps, but whilst the Mookalon has shown great interest in my work, I fear his technical skills may be a bit lacking at 20 months old, plus he will find it hard to handle 10ft long lengths of lumber!

So, for all our sakes, let us hope that I manage to complete my magnum opus before the aforementioned llama is loosed upon the skies above Spring Hill!

Today, I purchased the rest of the lumber to make the 3 remaining corner posts. This in itself was a major task, since I needed 6 10ft lengths of wood, 6 8 ft lengths, 9 10 ft quadrants, and 7 3ft square wooden dowels. After such exertion, I was tempted to call it a day, but fear of the falling llama spurred me on to continue the work.

Since starting this project, what seems like aeons ago, it is clear to me that my work must be held up there with the great achievements of mankind, like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the temporary Ice Rink on Haven Green in Ealing last Christmas. Whilst it is true that some of these endeavours were slightly larger in scale than my TARDIS, I'm sure that all of them had significant numbers of professional engineers assisting, whereas I have had naught but my own steel and grit to take it forward.

Indeed, I feel that my contribution to the world of carpentry exceeds that even of Noah, who didn't even have a blog to help Ark builders who followed him - probably why you don't hear of too many people building Arks these days!

Not content with my invention of "Labelling stuff" which is a boon for all mankind, and one that I've decided to freely licence to would be labellers, today I discovered another technique that has been of great help to me and I'm sure to others who have the privilege of reading this blog.

I like to call this technique, "Pre-drilling holes in stuff". In essence, instead of just relying on the wood screw to make its own hole in the wood, I've found that drilling a small "pilot" hole (as I like to call it) makes it much easier to subsequently position the screw and then drive it in. I only wish that my genius had devised this technique some time earlier in the build, but to be honest I couldn't be arsed to keep swapping a drill bit and screw driver bit over on my cordless drill.

Imagine my surprise then, when I finally actually opened up and looked at the 201 piece cordless drill accessory set I bought the other day and found that it contained "snap in" drill bits which can be swapped over for screwdriver bits in mere seconds. If someone else hadn't thought of it before me, I'd have probably thought of it myself by now and be on my way to buying Iceland (that's the country, not the store, because the country is cheaper!).

Anyway, armed with my new patent-pending technique, I was able to completely assemble another 2 corner posts, and complete a significant amount of the last one. I was unfortunately prevented from doing so by two issues:

• One of the 3" width pieces of lumber was very significantly twisted. I don't know why I didn't spot it when I bought it as I was very careful in my selection, so I can only assume that it became warped by the curious temporal energies that have been surrounding my TARDIS project. Anyway, I've clamped it up to leave overnight to see if it ends up any straighter, but to be honest I'm not hopeful about it.
• The second reason was that I ran out of wood glue. And these led me to my 3rd major discovery which is "Buy more stuff than you think you need because you'll probably need more stuff than you think you do". The premise here is quite simple - if you see 3 tubes of wood glue on the shelf, a small one, a medium sized one, and a large one, and you think you can get away with the medium sized one, buy the large one instead because you'll have undoubtedly underestimated how much of it you'll actually need!

Anyway, so tomorrow I'll have to return to Lowes (again!) to get some more wood glue, and probably buy another 8ft long length of 3x1 to replace the one twisted by chronoton radiation.

I should then be able to complete the last corner post, but this then means that I have to start actually preparing the subassemblies I've already built for final assembly. So I'll be filling gaps and holes with wood filler, sanding down everything to the desired level, and then treating it with some kind of sealant to keep out the weather and pests.

After that, it gets really scary since I'll need to start assembling everything I've got (the base, th roof and the corner posts) to resemble some kind of strange gazebo because I can't really make the side panels and the doors without being able to accurately measure the available space between the corner posts. So far, all my construction efforts have been on a largely theoretical basis, and bringing everything together is when I'll find out just how well I've really been doing!

Ozymandias - your great works may have ground to dust, but mine will endure for weeks or even months! So ya boo sucks to you!