More Practice, Better Results – Preparing to Assemble Frame B

The next day, I inspected the corner I had glued—and from the back side, it was a mess. One of the screws had caused the pine to crack, and the whole joint didn’t look very promising. Clearly, more practice was needed before committing to the real frame.

Fortunately, I still had a few small leftover pine pieces, so I cut one to the angle required for a frame B corner. This time, I was extra careful. I switched to a different pilot and countersink drill bit, double-checked the correct depth before drilling, and took things slow. The results were miles ahead of the previous attempt—everything went together smoothly. Just having that one prior test under my belt, and a fresh start the next day, made all the difference.

Second attempt - much better

The gluing also went better this time. Practice really does pay off—it’s clear that if I had rushed into building frame B without these test joints, I would’ve repeated all the same mistakes, except on my actual parts.

After glueing - looks messy, but I was just covering the screws with epoxy

Because I used two of the plywood knees I had originally made for frame B on these test corners, I needed to make replacements. This time, I tried something simpler: instead of reconstructing the geometry, I just placed the pine pieces in their final positions on the plywood and traced around them. Much faster and more intuitive than all the trigonometry I had worked out earlier when I didn’t yet have the wood.

Draw the angled shape below the pine pieces

The side and top is easy to draw with a ruler

I also experimented with cutting the new knees using the manual miter saw, but wasn’t happy with the results—the long cuts through the plywood aren’t easy to brace, and the blade tends to curve slightly. I’ll stick with the jigsaw for now. It’s still imperfect, but gives better results with more control.

Worth a try, but didn't work...

I left the new test corner to cure and came back the next day to inspect it. This time, the results were solid—I finally felt confident and ready to move forward with the real assembly of frame B.