Week 6: Building the Pedestal (Part 1)

This Friday, Marije, Dzhulia and I met at my place to start building the pedestal. My landlords have a large garage and we wanted to start building soon. We were also very lucky to be able to use some tools from my landlord Walter, who also builds a lot in his free time. This would turn out to be essential during the three days of construction...

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Friday

On Friday, we met at 6pm in order to build the pedestal. Our plan was to build the entire pedestal and paint it on the following day. I had already picked up the wood from Hubo on Wednesday, but the side parts still needed cutting. So that was the first thing we did.

Dzhulia had borrowed a jigsaw from her elder brother Mario, a carpenter, and the good thing was that she already had experience with using this tool thanks to Project Creative Solutions.

When we had cut all the side parts into the correct shape, we started building. To our surprise, Hubo had not cut all the pieces in the dimensions that we had instructed them, but luckily, assembling the pedestal still worked. The only thing we had to do was to fill some gaps between the diagonal front part and the vertical front part, as well as between the diagonal front part and the horizontal top part.

We actually wanted to glue the pieces together and use nails to fix them, because Douwe had told us that we could use nails. However, Walter said that this was not a good idea and we should use screws instead. We did not have any screws but Walter was as nice as to let us use his. He also showed us how to drill a whole first with the correct diameter for the screws and then turn the screw inside the wood. For this, we were allowed to use Walter's tools. Dzhulia did most of the drilling and screwing, and she learned fast. We also started producing a small timelapse, which we wanted to continue on the next day.

Unfortunately, the time passed faster than we had thought. We ended up having both pedestal top parts done but not the legs. Also, the gaps still needed to be filled.

We worked in total 5 hours on Friday.

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Saturday

On Saturday, a lot of things did not go as planned but at least we made some progress. We started working at 12 o'clock, which soon turned out to be quite late for a start. Since we did not have bolts, we first had to cycle to the nearest building centre in Gronau and get them. Besides the bolts, we also bought small hinges and hooks for the back parts of our interactive letters. This all already took one hour of our time.

Then we started with the wood filler. We soon noticed that we did not have enough wood filler and that it took three hours to dry, which we had totally forgotten to think about. Applying the wood filler took approximately half an hour per pedestal, but we only had enough wood filler for one pedestal.

We decided to drill the big holes for the legs first, since it could not be done by one person alone, while the other person was getting new filler, and since Walter was there to show us how to do it. We had to drill holes through the pedestals and through the legs, and through these holes, the bolts would go then.

After finishing the holes for the back legs, we got on our bicycles again and cycled to Action in De Eschmarke because my landlady Christine told us that they had woodfiller there, and it would be cheaper than the one from Hubo. Unfortunately, they only had woodfiller for gaps of 1mm and not 1cm, as we needed. We decided to just buy some paint rolls and superglue, and get the wood filler on the way back at Hubo in Glanerbrug.

When we came back with all the supplies, it was already 5pm. We then applied the wood filler to the second pedestal as well.

When the wood filler was dry on the first pedestal, it still was not smooth enough. Walter recommended us to smoothen the wood filler with sand paper and apply a second layer of a different wood filler for smaller ridges. I was not a fan of it, because we had already lost so much time, but Walter was right, so we did that too.

Then we continued with drilling the legs.

When the wood filler was dry on the second pedestal as well, we applied the same procedure with the sand paper and the second layer of filler. Parallely, we tried to drill the front legs of the first pedestal, and that was when things started going wrong.

We had only a height of 10cm for the front part of the pedestal, which started to become a problem. Not only was it extremely difficult to drill two holes for two bolts in this small range, which also made the pedestal less stable, but the front part bent, messing up the gap that we had closed so nicely with the wood filler. And when we finally put up one of the pedestals with its four legs, we realised that the legs were too long and they were super unstable. The whole pedestal looked like a thin-legged spider that was about to tumble over at the slightest hint of a breeze.

For the bendy front part, we decided to use two spare side parts and put then in the middle of the pedestals to stabilise the pedestals from within. Again, we used the jigsaw and cut the wood in Walter's workshop.

Dzhulia and I decided that we needed to cut off 15cm of each leg. It was not Hubo's fault but our own miscalculation. But first, we wanted to finish the drilled holes in the legs. When we did that, another mistake happened: We drilled one hole a bit too close to the top of the leg, the wood broke and now there is only a small layer of wood separating the whole from the upper end of the wooden pillar. There is nothing we can do to fix it but hoping and praying that this leg will last for three days.

It was already half past 10pm, and as you can imagine, our level of frustration was extremely high. Things had gone wrong and the progress was far from what we'd had in mind. Dzhulia had actually wanted to study for the Web Development redo on Sunday and I had wanted to code the website on Sunday. Now another shift was waiting for us, with no help from the rest of the team because all of our team mates were unavailable this weekend.

We worked in total 10.5 hours on Saturday.

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Sunday

On Sunday, we met at 10am. Our day started with asking Walter for advice on how to stabilise our legs. He had already said that we should make a horizontal connection of the back legs, but we had at first not wanted that because it would make the leg part so big that it could not be stored at Saxion. Now we had no other choice anymore.

Walter also advised us to give the side legs some feet, so that the pedestal cannot fall over to the front and the back. He had some wooden planks that we could use for that, but he did not have a good piece of wood that was suitable for the horizontal connections. Luckily, he was about to go to the building centre anyway and willing to buy the wood for us. And he was going alone, while we could keep working! That was a great relief for us.

We first started by adding two small planks from Walter's supplies to the inside of the pedestal 1. On one of them, we want to place our music speakers. And the other one is for symmetry and stabilisation. That went relatively quick.

After doing that, we painted the two top parts of the pedestals with wood primer, because the wood primer needed at least one hour to dry. Actually it needed three hours, but Walter said that in full sunlight, it would dry faster.

While Walter was at the building centre, we cut all the legs by 15cm each with Walter's saw, which was a lot of work. Subsequently, we painted them with primer as well.

Then came the feet. Walter had given us a 240cm wooden plank from his supplies, out of which we made 4 wooden feet that should keep the side legs together and also keep the pedestals from falling over to the front or back. The wood for the feet was the most difficult to cut because it was quite firm and thick. Of course, we also painted these as soon as they were done.

When we were done with that, Walter returned from the building centre, which was approximately at 3pm. He had the long connection part for us. Out of it, we sawed two pieces that should connect the respective back legs of the pedestals. Unfortunately, the piece was so long that it was hard to saw and mistakes happened again. Our cut was not straight. Walter had to help us out again with some sand paper and a machine on which you can put the sand paper and let it rotate. The two pieces that we got out of our newest wooden pillar were painted with the primer as well.

Next, we applied our black paint to the pedestal top parts, the primer of which had dried meanwhile. Walter criticised us for having used water-based primer but non-water-based paint. He said that water-based black paint would have been better and that he could have even given us some. If only we had known about all these things in advance, but we blindly followed the instructions of the Hubo staff while purchasing our supplies!

We let the primer on all the leg components dry for a while. Since it was late, we decided not to put the leg components together today, since we were tired and mistakes can happen easily. Instead, we applied the black paint to all these parts and decided to finish the construction on Wednesday after the Web Development redo.

Now we have to wait 20 hours for the black paint to dry anyway. Maybe even longer - due to the mix of water-based with non-water-based paint.

We worked 10 hours on Sunday.

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Conclusion of the Weekend

In sum, it was a weekend full of progress but also learning and frustration. We realised that we should have listened more to experts like Mario or Walter in the first place instead of just doing our thing. Also, building such a big pedestal with only two people (on Friday three) and a complete lack of experience is a challenge. On Saturday night, we were really on a low, but luckily we saw some light on the horizon on Sunday.

Personally, I feel as if I've been involved in a lot of tasks that should not have been mine. I never wanted to be a part of the construction team, since I neither particularly enjoy crafts nor do I have the talent for it. Yet the actual responsibles or those who wanted to help (except Dzhulia) failed to show up on that weekend for several reasons and again, I had to jump in to fill the gap. It annoys me that I have made no progress with the website, again, since I know very well that I'm the only person who is capable of programming our very complex website. In the end, the all-nighters will be on me, and I already feel how the workload of the project is taking its toll on my health (both mentally and physically). I've quite my part-time job for this project, yet the tasks that I have to manage don't seem to get done in the time at our disposal.

In the end, I would also like to thank Christine and Walter for letting us turn their home into a construction site and especially Walter for letting us use his tools and for giving us wood, and for shopping new wood for us, and last but not least also for his advice and instructions. Without him we could not have managed to get this far with the pedestal or would have built a very bad one.