Homemade Cookie Tin Banjo, part 9

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Next step is to glue the square blocks to the other two pieces. I planned to use 5-minute epoxy rather than regular wood glue. First, I want it to be waterproof, just in case, and second, the extra strength might be necessary. Remember I'm going to put a bolt thru this and tighten it pretty tight; not sure how much force that will exert on the joint... say on the order of 500 newtons or something. Then on top of that I'm going to be pushing on the neck of the banjo, wrenching it; possibly bringing the force much higher.

Looking at the surface of this wood, it's really hard and smooth; how much is glue going to soak into it? So I roughed it up. I used a little bit I have chucked in the Dremel tool, but a knife or a hammer and nail would work fine.

While we're looking right at this, the board was sold as a "1 x 3" meaning 1 inch thick by 3 inches wide. It isnt anywhere near that. That's the dimensions of a board when it's cut out of the log. Then it's passed thru a planing machine and it gets smaller. This was 0.75 x 2.5 inches. That has always bothered me.

The 2.5 inches wasnt even uniform, it varied along the length of the board. The corporation that sold me this didnt care about that, only about getting my money.

By the way, everybody thinks it's a marvelous idea to go to a "paperless society". What will happen if we do? The paper mills will close, and the pulp mills will close, and the market for wood will be vastly reduced, and so the lumber companies will sell off their forests, and houses will be built on the land. If you are all concerned about global warming and everything, you should not be worried about printing some long document and "killing a tree". You kill a tree this way, they plant another tree - because it's profitable to do so.

Actually, if the CO2 component of our atmosphere were to go up by 1%, the plant life on this planet would flourish like crazy, and people would become sleepy - so there'd be fewer wars.

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