January 1, 2012 Progress

Lisa, Don, and I Spent about 1.5 hours on the morning of New Year's Day working on the Bearhawk.  First task was installing legs on Wing Stand #2.  This was mostly Don and Lisa drilling indiscriminately while I covered my eyes.

In parallel, we got the Varner miter saw up running, and used it to cut leg extenders from pressure-treated 4x4 purloined from a long-abandoned Swamptooth landscaping project.  Unfortunately we ran out of lumber and had to take a very long long lunch break to steal another 4x4 from my front yard.

After cutting to length, with nice square ends thanks to the Varner saw, we drilled out holes for the casters, using a drill block intended for rivet removal, clamped to the square end of the post:

Next we enlarged the pilot hole with a worn-out 1/4" bit and then a 5/16 spade bit before threading in the caster (obtained at no cost from the Varner Compound).

Next was the tricky part: getting the leg extenders properly positioned onto the fixtures.  To do this we initially eyeballed the height and clamped them up.  By this time it was just Don and me.

We then fine tuned the height of each leg and reclamped everything to drill bolt holes to attach the extenders.  We got one stand done and partially crossbraced before Kent came over and our productivity ground to a halt.

We didn't keep careful track of hours, but the 2nd half was from about 6:30 to 9:30, so 3 hours times 2 belly buttons.  Total project time for the day: 3 x (1.5) + 2 x (3) = 10.5 hours.