Week 7: Building the Pedestal (Part 2)

Today, Dzhulia and I finished up the work on our pedestal. Apart from some small changes that we still need to make in order to attach the letters and the phone/tablet cases, we are pretty much done with it!

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Adjusting the Legs

As a first step today, we wanted to test whether our pedestal was now fully stable with the shortened legs. Last time, we had done a miscalculation and built the pedestal way too high, which resulted in us having to cut off 15 cm of every leg. We also needed the fully built up pedestals in order to see what they would look like next to each other and how the stabilising feet would need to be adjusted.

Luckily, we did this test, because to our suprise, we had to discover that the pedestals were not leveled. The back legs were a bit higher than the front legs. We were of course not happy about it because it meant that, again, some miscalculation had happened. But we were ready to tackle the issue and glad that we had noticed it soon enough, before actually attaching the feet.

So we measured each of the legs and noticed that from the back legs of one pedestal, 1.2 cm had to be cut off and from the back legs of the other pedestal, 1.6 cm had to be cut off.

Walter helped us again today, and he gave us a hand with the measurements of what had to be cut off and with actually cutting it off. With his circular saw, he removed 1.2 cm and 1.6 cm respectively.

With the new lengths of our legs, we assembled the pedestals again, but to our disappointment we saw that now, one pedestal was around 4cm higher than the other one. We started thinking about whether we should leave the pedestals as they were or readjust the legs again.

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Buying More Bolts

All of a sudden, while we were still thinking about how to fix our problem with the legs, Dzhulia's brother Mario showed up. He is a carpenter. He wanted to give us some advice on how to improve our pedestal, which was indeed much needed. Mario suggested that we put one of the feet between the legs of the pedestals next to each other, and another foot more on top between the two pedestals, by which we could also solve our problem of having to level the two pedestals.

At first, I was not happy about the suggested solution because I understood the suggestion as screwing the feet between the pedestals on. However, I did not want to work with screws because if we have to screw and unscrew the feet several times, the screws might damage the wood. Also, I did not want to deviate from our original plan of screwing on the feet and just putting the pedestals next to each other. I was a bit stubborn, mainly because I did not want to spend more time than needed on the construction of the pedestal. After all, another day spent on the pedestal would mean less time for me to work on my original task - the website.

I almost got into an argument with Walter. He was not happy with my attitude towards Mario and Dzhulia's suggestion. I think that my negative attitude came from all the stress that I have been constantly exposed to. In this moment, I felt really bad for my behaviour and decided to utter my concerns instead of keeping sulking about the decisions made by Dzhulia and her brother.

The great thing was that they came up with a new idea: Using bolts instead of screws in order to connect the pedestals with the feet between them. I was up for it because I could really picture it in my mind that we could easily build the pedestal up and take it down several times with bolts. But in order to realise this idea, we had to get more bolts.

So we drove to the next building centre in Gronau and looked for bolts. We found four bolts for the connecting feet between the pedestals and another four feet for attaching the outside feet to the outside legs.

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Attaching the Feet

Admittledly, for the next step, we got help from Mario. His experience as a carpenter came in handy. I am really thankful to him for his help. He helped us drill the holes in the middle legs and the two middle feet. Without him, it would have been nearly impossible. After that, he left Dzhulia and I alone with the outside feet - a task that we mastered finishing on our own. In the end, we had this pedestal, all of which is modular.

Dzhulia and I also discussed whether we should still attach the horizontal connections between the back legs, which we had initially planned to give the pedestal more stability. In the end, we decided not to attach them because if we did that, the pedestal legs would be connected in a way that would make them very bulky and thus we would not be able to store them at Saxion. This, however, is bad if we want to show our pedestal to the teachers and if we want to carry out tests at Saxion with our pedestal.

As a last step, we had to attach an additional wooden plank to one of the pedestals for the music box because we had accidentally mixed up the order of the pedestal. But compared to everything else that we had built today, it was an easy task and we finished it quickly.

We worked on the pedestal today from 1pm until 10pm.

As a conclusion to the construction of the pedestal, I would like to point out the great work that my team mate Dzhulia did on the pedestal. While I was only the assistant, she really excelled at her task of drilling all the wholes and attaching all the screws, she also sawed more than half of the wood. Since she is also the building responsible, she had to make all the decisions for the pedestal, and she made very good decisions. I think that she has a great talent for construction tasks and I would always be happy to work with her on the construction of an installation again.