Ten (24/11/10 - 25/11/10)

Finally, giant strides. Even though weeks behind schedule I've actually got the main body of the bag in a somewhat assembled state, hopefully people will now start looking at it in a different light.

The big development since earlier in the week is the completion of the middle compartment. It took far longer than expected, mainly due to the epoxy resin being too weak for the job, which was the 5mm edge of the acylric to a milled off flat surface on the two segments of the laminated plywood (which had the slight curve), this photo should help if that was too confusing:

As you can see the plywood is also unsupported so they were incredibly fragile by themselves, for this reason I had to make two makeshift jigs so that they could be sanded and drilled. The jigs consisted of a simple 2x4 cut to the correct length so that the plywood didn't bend back on itself and double-sided to a larger MDF piece.

The reason they are in 3 segments is that 2 lasercut splines with the acrylic tube profile is put between them to make the middle tube in the hinge secure. If that once again sounded too confusing, this photo should clear it up:

Either side of the outer segments is a lasercut profile of the side components. Once again this is to keep everything level, but more importantly to stregthen the indivdual segments. Each segment has about 10 holes dripped in its edge where copper rod is slotted in, which then goes through the lasercut splines into the adjacent segment. These copper rods also act to keep the plywood up so that it meets the side component outline, as seen in this photo:

For example, this segment is sandwiched between a lasercut spline and the side component outline, so that the copper rod will thread through the segment and outline into the actual side component (which will be attached to the outline). This should hopefully make these segments stronger and less prone to sagging, which they do a lot. Also this way of attaching the side components to these outline allows me to spray the front, rear and middle components separately as the metal rod between them can not be threaded until the side components are attached.

On the front and rear side of things, both have had their internal structure done and are now in the process of cladding, which is proving to be a bit tricky, especially as I don't have a former. Anyways here is the bag assembled in skeleton form: