When I was dry fitting the hemisphere I was using a lot of drywall screws to hold vertical supports to each other. The result was that at times when I screwed one vertical to another… I could see that as I screwed the verticals there were some casualties. At times the lateral supports were being pulled out of their dadoes.

Dry fitting and pulling a few screws was fine, but I started to formulate an opinion about how I would do the final glue up for the support structure. Stay loose.

Aeromarine epoxy can fill some pretty enormous gaps, so I am not too worried about gaps between the long verticals if they gap a bit here and there. What I am worried about is clamping too tightly in this step and forcing the epoxy bonds to break at the lateral supports. This would be terrible.

So let’s see how it goes.

In the end, each of the lateral supports will be tied together not only by a ton of epoxy, but also by many layers of cold molded cedar (and more epoxy).

Stay tuned…