Two days ago, I finally got the lumber I needed for my shooting gallery project. Since I had temporarily lost access to Hive, I shared a brief update yesterday on SubscribeStar. Here is the preview photo that I shared there:
These two "shelves" were cut from a single piece of 48" x 96" (4ft x 8ft or 1,25m x 2,5m) 3/4" plywood. The only other cuts I made were 45-degree mitre trims on the ends of two 2"x4"x8' ground-contact boards that will serve as the diagonal support members. The design I'm currently working on is a bit different from what I initially put together in my video, and will look something like this:
All other lumber will be used whole. The only other work I did was to drill pilot holes for the construction screws. That was yesterday, and today, I spent all day painting everything except for the 4"x4"x8' ground-contact posts. Those will go into the ground, and get painted later. Here are all the component pieces, other than the support posts, in storage in my workshop (I painted them outside), ready to be transported to my shooting range site tomorrow:
The shelves are sitting behind two whole 4'x8' pieces of not-quite 3/4" (23/32, to be precise) OSB (oriented strand board, a.k.a. chip-board), which will serve as the target back. I tested a small scrap of OSB that I had with my reflex bow at short range, and it stops arrows quite well. In fact, it works a little too well, since one of my arrows broke. No matter, the the whole point of the OSB is to catch stray arrows that miss the target (I am rather inept at traditional archery). OSB won't stop bullets, but that's what the pile of wood behind the gallery is for. The reason I went for OSB instead of plywood is simply because it's cheaper. All of this lumber cost me $200, if anyone is curious.
Everything is sitting on top of a really old Craftsman table saw. How old is it? Well, let's just say it's from the days when Craftsman still made high-quality tools. Obviously, it's much older than I am.
Tomorrow, all this and more will get loaded into my tractor cart (yet another thing that I built myself) and then I'll spend a good portion of the day digging holes. I can't say whether or not the project will be finished tomorrow. If it is, expect the results to show up in The Pew. If not, enjoy my filler content.