The Slats that Never End...

Up until this point things have gone relatively smoothly and quickly. And then we started the slats. For those of you unfamiliar with the inter workings of this station wagon. The slats run from the back to the front on the roof of the car. Most of the parts that we have to do for these cars (because we are doing three) come in sets of 3 or 6. So it doesn't take much more to cut them. Unfortunately each car has 19 slats in it. If you do the math that is 57 slats...yes 57. My dad's not even that old. Each one of the slats has to be rounded on all four corners. The slats are roughly 96 inches long. Again if you do the math that comes out to 21,888 linear inches. Just for fun since we're all a bunch of math people around here that converts to 1824 feet. So lets take this one step further and that equates to just over a quarter of a mile of rounding corners. Lets stop and pause for a question. Has anyone ever walked a quarter mile on their thumbs?

I know most of you are saying no. My father and I would also like to say no, but our thumbs scream out in protest.

Some of you would like to know the technical aspects of what we are doing. So for those of you who like the technical side here you go.

We started with what the wood working world would call 6/4. For those who don't know what that means it is a board that is roughly very roughly 1 1/2 inches thick. We cut it to the width that we needed and then using the saw we split it in half. And then planed it to the desired thickness of 1/4 inch. After which we did the rounding of the corners with the shaper and then proceeded to sand.

I know you are all thinking at this point well that was really easy. But those 5 simple sentences took us the better part of a full day to complete.

Just for all of you followers out there I don't want you think that I have any resentment towards these slats. Because in the near future they will prevent many of mother nature's attacks on me and my family inside my car. Or as my Grandfather would put it it wont rustle my hair.