Having cut all my lumber to make the base, I'd laid everything out in the correct place for later construction, and went away for something to eat and drink.
When I came back and started putting it together, I noticed that one of the lengths of board that I was going to use for one of the sides of the base wasn't as good quality as some of my other boards (colour, dampness etc) so I decided to swap it over with one of the floorboards.
I then proceeded to put it all together. The first job was to screw all the sides together, which I duly did, and then moved on to fixing the floor boards on. Imagine my surprise when the lengths of my floor boards were too short for the rest of the base!
Now, the base is supposed to be 55" square (there, or thereabouts anyway) so when I measured it I was nearly 57" in one direction, and 56" in the other. Now two of the sides were cut to 55" and the other two to 53.5" - the idea being that "widths" on the two 55" boards will add to the length of the 53.5" boards to get me to 55". This would've been fine, if I had screwed the 53.5" boards to the "inside" of the 55" board but when I looked at what I'd done I'd made a bit of a hash of it and been totally inconsistent with putting it altogther.
No problem though - I just disassembled it again and screwed it together consistently, and correctly, so now my problem is fixed, and my floor boards will fit perfectly to the base, right?
Wrong! Remember when I said I switched over a side board for a floor boards? Well, as luck (all bad) would have it, the board I switched was a 53.5" board and the floor boards were all 55". Doh!
So, once again, I had to remove that board and put the original board back in place. Once this was done, I had my base at 55" square, and the floor boards all fitted ok!
What else did I learn during this exercise? Well, I'd already mentioned that my boards were not all equal in every dimension as they should have been - in fact, the only dimension they general were equal in was in length and this was the dimension I was responsible for as I cut the boards to length!
So, some of my boards are a little taller (when vertical anyway) than others. Thus my base, although pretty much square, isn't as level as it probably should be due to the slight differences in height of the side boards. As it happens, this shouldn't really be a problem for the base since the ground it will eventually sit on won't be naturally level anyway, and I could always plane the sides a little anyway to get it perfect.
It does however teach me some valuable lessons!
- Be much more careful when buying lumber. Whilst I tried to avoid bowed boards when I bought the lumber, I didn't check all dimensions. In future, I will cherry pick the boards I buy much more thoroughly to ensure they are as close as possible to each other in all dimensions.
- Where there is a difference, try to ensure that these boards are used where it won't really matter. For example, the floor of the base would've been a good place to put the dodgiest of my boards.
- Don't be a plonker and mix up cuts. If a board is cut for a specific position, it's cut for that position. If it isn't right for any reason, just cut another one and if necessary throw the old one out or reuse in a different location.
- When screwing the whole lot together, think first!
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