Assembling frames #1

After my kit arrived, the first step was to cut out all the pieces. That job alone took me two weekends. If I had one piece of advice for other new builders, it would be to just pick a frame they want to build first and cut only those pieces out and start assembling. Because once you glue the pieces together, you can wait around and do other stuff e.g. cut the rest of your kit pieces out. To set up a typical frame and glue the pieces together probably takes around 2-3 hours once you get used to it. Then you have nothing left to do but wait. While you wait, you can cut the next frame out.

Like many other builders, I started with frame E. My logic was that it's the smallest and therefore seemed the easiest to start with. It's not a bad frame to start with. As it was the first frame I put together I will say with no shame - it took me two days to do it. Why? Because I was overthinking it. I laid it out on my table first, then I pondered for a long time, how I should do it. Pondering took at least 80% of the time... the actual work, only 20%.

I laid out all the timber pieces on the table, lined with a white sheet of plastic. Then I screwed them down to the table so they wouldn't move. In hindsight, this approach was a bit of an overkill and didn't work well because you have to lift the pieces up to apply epoxy anyway. Some other builders suggested screwing scrap pieces of plywood in place as "guides". That's an option but I also found that to be too time-consuming.

My final refined approach to assembling frames goes like this: First, dry assemble the frame on the table by laying the timber pieces out. Measure dimensions and ensure they match the plans, particularly the diagonals. Then carefully without moving the pieces, pre-drill holes into the plywood gussets. On the first pass, I typically only drilled two screws into each gusset piece to join it with the two timber pieces. This way, I could remeasure everything after I semi-fixed the pieces in place. If anything was not perfect to the milimitre, I could still do fine adjustments. Then I pre-drilled the remaining screws into place. This made my frames ready for glueing. If I hit the pre-drilled holes again I could be sure that I'd end up with a square and symmetrical frame. Then I unscrewed all the screwed to a point where they were still sticking out of the plywood gussets by a millimetre or two. This way, once I had the glue applied, I could easily line up the screws back into their pre-drilled holes.

So once the prep was done, it was time to mix the epoxy and thicken it into adhesive consistency with microfibers. I'm working with Gurit AmPro epoxy system, which gives me a simple 1:3 by volume mixing ratio. By weight the mixing ratio is slightly less for hardener but it's barely noticeable e.g. 29:100. I thought I'll get myself pumps to make the job simpler but unfortunately I was only able to get the right size of pump for the 20kg resin bucket. Pumps for hardener canisters are still not in stock to this day due to shipping delays, so I gave up. As an alternative I weight out the amount of hardener with a kitchen scale. I have to trust it and it tends to work pretty well if I keep the batteries charged well. Each pump of resin is about 32-33g of resin, so that means I need to mix in just over 9g of hardener. The accuracy of the scale is 1g so this is what I have to work with. It's not 100% accurate but it's accurate enough for the resin to harden reliably. I found that I preferred to mix epoxy by weight, rather than by volume.

Once the glue is applied and the pieces are screwed together, it's time to apply some pressure and leave it to cure. I used a random assortment of bricks and pavers to do this. It's also a good idea to put plastic on everything that touched epoxy so it doesn't accidentally bond to something it shouldn't.