Not much time left, teamwork is accelerating. Yesterday afternoon, we loaded our wood materials for our poles and rafters, and some paints to the shop. Group one in was working on welding some last few trusses and cutting holes on each of it. Katie and Ed was cleaning and grinding all the door frames that we have osphoed few days ago. Yibo was making the hooks for fixing the canvas awnings above the door.
The rest of us in the woodshop finished trimming the edge of the slats to make sure it is not that sharp in the edge, and then prepare to fit the slats on the blockings.
However, thing doesn’t go as easily as we thought. We have a little challenge while we fixing the door slats. The first trial of fixing slats on the door frame turned out to be a failure since we found some of the slats that we fixed on the blockings covered the place where the bolt should go into, which means the distance of each gap was no longer ⅞” as we designed in the CD since the width of the slats were a little shorter after we trimmed. But luckily, Professor Pastre provided us a smart solution to help us to find the new distance by using the play cards. One problem solved!
On the the second trial, we started to create some blocks on the plywood desk to make a jig that could help us fix the door slats as we did the same to make the door frames and truss in the metal shop.But later to find the blockings and slats are so bowed, pretty much unlike the steel bars which are comparably straight, that made us hard to fix them to a base jig, since the shape of the blockings changed every time we picked a new piece, and we could not create multiple same pieces of diagonals at the same time. The team face a dilemma that if we should spend more time (Which we had already spent 3hrs on it )on finding a better way to make a jig that could apply to the other 15 doors, or we just gave up making a so-called jig and but put a door frames on the table used as “jig”, and then put the blockings on it to make the diagonal, put slats on it.
We made a team vote (and I voted!) to make a another trial by using the second solution that we came up with. Therefore at the end of the day, we cut two diagonals to fixed on the blocking on the both long sides within our jig, which is our door frame, and we also figure out the new slats distance of this door, which is one 7/8” spacer added two play cards. Then we mocked up where we put our slats on it, but not fixing slats on it yet since we didn’t want to mess up the place where we should put bolts and we had no idea what kind of bolt that we would get.
We thought as a long as the blockings, diagonals and slats are within the range of door frames even if the pieces are bowed then this solution could also work for the rest of the fifteen door frames.