Shaping up.

The 29th of December I spent resting my arm and waiting for glue to dry.  By the 30th my elbow is feeling more stable so I get back to work.

My brother has already cleaned most of the glue from the hips and backbone, sanded the edges and routed a nice edge on the hips.

Glued and routed hips.

We are using gorilla glue, which is an excellent glue.  It expands and fills in any voids or cracks or imperfections and then oozes out to form little foamy globs.  So there is a lot of cleaning up to do.

Backbone ready to be sanded and routed.

With a sharp knife and a big disk sander cleaning up the left over glue is fairly quick, albeit noisy, work.  The sander is fairly heavy, but I can hold the weight with my right arm using my left for balance and direction.  My arm is fine, so I keep going until the deep inset underneath the elephants head.  I know I should stop at this point, but my this isn't entirely in my nature, and it is only a small but complicated shape, what can go wrong?

Moments later I discover the elbow position which is causing pain at the same time as the sander catches on something and does a small, and in other circumstances insignificant, kick.  I don't know which happened first, but this is very painful, and I have to stop for a rest.  If I keep hurting my arm like this I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep going on this job.

Resting is, also wasted time, so we do the sensible thing and head off to 'Bunnings Warehouse' to find some different power tools/accessories which will allow easier sanding in the complex curves.  We also spotted an ice bucket for $15 which looked almost perfect Elephant head.  I tested this for psycho-acoustic properties, and am currently almost convinced.

At this point in time the exact head design is still being planned and plotted.  The original small model has a head, of sorts, but it would be heavy and doesn't look the way I want it too.  I have several ideas for better heads, but I am still debating between various possibilities.  So I am still open to found items that look like they have an elephant head within them.  Especially if they sound good.

I finish off sanding the glue from the backbone with a sanding drum, this is a lot easier on my arm.

Sanding out complicated shapes.

After sanding the edges of the backbone are routed to give a nice smooth edge.  This is a quick, albeit noisy, process and is very satisfying.

Routing smooth edges

There is still more work with the jigsaw cutting out the final shape of the legs.  The jigsaw is starting to sound a bit unhappy so we take it apart and grease the various wheels to see if we can get a little more life out of the saw.

Cutting the leg with a jigsaw.

At this stage the legs are still held together with screws alone and we need to glue them before moving on.  My original thoughts were to have several acoustic cavities in the legs, but now they are in their final shapes they look too thin for this.  Only the shoulders and hips seems to have enough material, so we route out one experimental cavity in the left hip.  The leg is then clamped together so we can test its sonic potential.  Using a piece of scrap wood as a drum stick the sound is disappointing.  It is also getting late in the day, so we abandon the idea of additional cavities and start gluing the legs together with Gorilla glue.

Rear leg with glue.

After glueing we screw the legs together to make sure the glue bonds well.  The alternative would be to clamp them together, but that would have required a large number of clamps.

Legs drying overnight.