Building pedestal (part 4)

Today we finally finished the pedestal.

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The first, and maybe the most important thing that we had to do today, was attaching the feet to the legs. But before we do that, we had to put all the legs to both of the pedestals and see how stable they are, and if the height of the pedestal is now good after we cut 15 cm off.

Of course, the pedestal was not leveled. I was going to be surprised if something had turned out to be fine. The back legs were longer than the front legs. I am glad we made the test, before drilling the holes to the feet. After we measured the legs, again, we noticed that we have to cut 1.2cm from the back legs (of the first pedestal) and 1.6 cm from the back legs of the other pedestal.

When we put the pedestals together again we found out that the pedestals have different height. I have no idea how and why, but it was a fact. We started thinking about solutions. I think that at this point I just wanted to give up. I was also a bit frustrated that Juli and I are the only ones who had to deal with building the pedestal, and Julia was not even responsible for the building at first place. She never wanted to take part in this task.

Last night I was talking to my brother and I told him that we have problems with the pedestal we are building. I ask him for advice on how Juli and I can fix the things that went wrong. But he was not very helpful, because I couldn't explain properly the problem.

While Julia and I were struggling with finding a solution my brother showed up. He said that he felt bad that he couldn't help me yesterday, and he wanted to stop by and see what our progress was.

He suggested that we put one of the feet between the top side of the pedestals, this aligns the pedestal when they are next to each other. And another foot between the legs as well as on the outer sides of the pedestals.

My brother suggested that we use screws to attach the feet and the connection parts. I tried to explain to him why I don't want to use screws. I could also see Juli's dissatisfaction with the idea of using screws. Mario said that bolts will also be fine, more expensive but the pedestals will be still very stable.

Using bolts instead of screws is an idea that both Julia and I agreed on. But in order to realize this, we had to go to the construction store and buy more bolts.

Mario gave us a ride to a store in Gronau. We found four long bolts for the connecting feet between the pedestals and another four (shorter) bolts for attaching the outside feet to the outside legs.

When we came back, Mario agreed to show us how to make the connections on the pedestal. It was the same thing we did with the legs, but I was really afraid that I will mess up something, that is why I asked my brother to drill the holes in the connection part in the middle because it was the most important. His experience as a carpenter was very helpful.

After that, he left us to continue on our own with the rest of the holes. We did good, in my opinion. In the end, we had a good-looking and stable pedestal.

Julia and I decided not to put the connection part on the back, because the pedestal was stable enough. I was also afraid that if we connect this part to the legs, maybe we might have problems when we attach/detach the legs.

The last thing we did today was attaching another wooden plank to the second pedestal. The reason why we did this was that we accidentally switched the pedestals. The first part of the pedestal needs the wooden plank because the speaker for the first E is going to be put on the wooden plank.

With that, we were finally done. I could not believe that this task is finally done. We put the parts of the pedestal in Christine's car. Juli's landlords helped us a lot. Not only did they allow us to use their garage, tools and wood supplies, but they also picked the wood for us (a few times), Christine also got the pedestal to school.

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Conclusion

I am so glad that the pedestal is built. And I am so thankful to Juli that she helped me with it. I would have never managed to build this thing on my own.

I am a little frustrated that no one else from the team showed up during the weekend to help us out with the pedestal. Because the truth is that it was very difficult to build it. There were these moments when I thought that we're never going to finish the pedestal or even if we do, it will not be what we want, or it will not be stable enough and brake.

I learned a lot while building the pedestal. I never thought that I will need to learn something like this, but it is very nice to be able to make something out of nothing. It was very satisfying, to look at the pedestal, knowing that it once was just a big piece of wood.