Time to assemble the mothership! Holy shit.

This is another realm of creating Stardust where I have very little experience.

The work party went very well - thank you Rolf & Marcy! We finished sanding and sealing the remaining bench parts (so I thought) which freed me to focus on assembling.

There are 32 bench parts and 3 "combs" per regular "pie slice." Putting each section (or pie slice) together requires balancing and wiggling pieces into place, supporting them with shims and clamps brings and milk crates. Then drilling pilot holes, squirting wood glue as far into connections as possible, screwing the parts together while putting my body into very awkward and painful positions and clamping everything together while the glue dries.

The final step - which took two days to figure out! - is sliding in 3/4" squares of plywood between the gaps of the smallest seat parts of the bench to prevent wobbling. This was not the original intent but CDX plywood is thinner than the CAD designer had anticipated in the design. The combs do not hold the bench parts as tightly as she had envisioned. I used glued shims at first and decided that the added wood would make a nice design element; however, I found the shims caused the parts to splinter and bow out. My husband suggested the plywood chunks and they ended up looking great! We kept the layers of the plywood in the same direction as the wood grain and layers of plywood of the bench parts.

As of today, ONE pie slice is done but I will have the second one filled with 3/4" blocks of plywood, glued and bound up tightly for drying. That will put me at 1/3 of the way done!!!