Clearstory Frame Assembly

Furniture grade plywood is nice stuff. Costing about twice as much as regular plywood, it has a nice smooth sanded finish to it. Since the layout is residing in our dining room at the moment, it should look really nice. So I sprung for the furniture grade plywood.

After sifting through their entire stack of 4’ x 8’ plywood, selecting their finest piece, I dragged it over to their saw for cutting. Before I even showed up to the lumberyard, I carefully planned out how to cut the 4’ x 8’ sheet most efficiently so that I ended up with two profile boards for the ends and two strips for the clearstory windows. The lumberyard only does rough cuts, the contouring I’ll do at home with my jigsaw.

If you look closely at the top piece of wood (as Thunder dog is doing) you can see how I drew out the final shape of the contour boards. Below it is the contour board cut out.

The kid at the lumberyard did a lousy job cutting the clearstory strips, they went from 3 ½” wide at one end to 4” wide at the other end, a mistake I didn’t catch until I got home. An unfixable mistake. But I can’t return the whole thing ‘cuz I already have the contour boards cut out. But, the plywood does seem a little too flimsy to me for this framing, so I decided instead to construct the clearstory windows from 1 ½” x ¾” “sustainably managed tree-farmed select pine”! This is some strong, beautiful wood. And it’s available at your local do-it-yourself lumberyard.

Hey! Things are shaping up. Look at that, its looking like it’s supposed to. The clearstory widows were attached to the profile boards, and then the profile boards were attached to the outside frame. All that’s left to do is to start nailing on the roof.

But first, I have bevel the outside frame so that the curved roof will conform to it. And then the whole thing needs to be sanded smooth. So... I better get to sanding. Yessir... better get to sanding.