To say this little cabinet is proving difficult is like saying that Hannibal had a fun time crossing the Alps, but he eventually accomplished what he set out to do, as will I...sort of, eventually. Although the side frames glued onto the back panel without too much angst, they didn't go on squarely and each one was slightly out by a few degrees.
The upshot of this 'out of squareness' is that it massively compounds the difficulty in fitting the top and bottoms, as they have to intersect with eight separate corners, so the problem I had was how to pull each side frame square?
Sash cramp?...too heavy, so it wouldn't stay in place. Each frame only needed to be pulled around 5 or 10 degrees, so very little force was needed.
The answer was the simplest of all cramping methods and I like simple. Simple is good.
A couple of very light tourniquets were applied...no more than a dozen turns on the cord and each of the frames was gradually pulled dead square.
Sometimes I really do have these 'eureka moments' but more often than not they're accompanied by periods of utterly dismal goofs!..
...one of which nearly happened when I was fitting the the bottom. The mitres on the corners were initially marked out with my Richard Kell sliding bevel, shown in the pic below.
As you can see, it tightens with a knurled knob, which is fine for transferring a pencil line, but when I applied pressure to the blade with a marking knife, the bloody thing slipped and I then proceeded to cut the wrong angle. Fortunately I picked up the 'goof' when I offered it up to the job so it was easily corrected by gluing on another slither of walnut to the edge.
Not so much 'tourniquet triumph' as a (sliding) 'bevel balls-up!
I think Hannibal had it easy.
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