Horse: Gluing together

Once again, my current professional schedule leaves me with little time to work on the project, but there are some little things I've been able to do that didn't take too long.

I have now glued the component parts of the horse together. First the wrestplank was glued to its two support blocks, using the same polyurethane glue that helped assemble the component parts of the pinblock:


Next, the upper belly rail was glued in place:


Once the glue dried, I drilled holes for dowels to reinforce the joint between the wrestplank and support blocks, and between the upper belly rail and support blocks:


These dowels compensate for the fact that some adjoining surfaces in the horse involve end grain, which does not form the best glue joints. I sized end-grain edges with a thin coat of glue to try to counteract their tendency to suck up glue and thereby deprive the joint of it, but the dowels provide additional security.

I did a little work on the lower belly rail as well, gluing its two knees to the back and nailing them in place while the glue dried:


The silver-coloured metal angles are right-angle assembly guides, which hold the knees square until the glue dries.

Although I had earlier thought about first gluing the lower belly rail to the back of the horse, and then gluing the knees against the lower belly rail, some dry-assembly experiments convinced me that the lower belly rail was too tippy to glue against the upper belly rail and still guarantee a good right angle with the baseboard. That's why I decided to glue the knees to the lower belly rail now, so that it will be held at a right angle once it is glued to the bottom.

Since I need to drill dowel holes to reinforce the joint between the lower belly rail and the support blocks—another end-grain gluing situation—I decided to glue the lower belly rail to the horse now, and make the horse a complete unit that will be attached all at once to the baseboard:


Drilling the dowel holes will be much easier while the horse is still separate from the baseboard. Once the joints are secure, the horse will be glued down at last.

If you look closely, you can see two dowel holes drilled into the right-hand wrestplank support block. These will hold the spine liner in place. I also took the opportunity to chamfer all the inside edges of the horse that will come into contact with the soundboard, just to free its edges a little bit once it is glued down.