Given that yesterday was Labor Day here in the US, I spent the day labouring on building benchwork.  The result was ripping three sheets of maple furniture plywood down into 0.75″x3.25″ and 0.75″x4″ dimensional members, and cutting three pieces of drywall that will separate the workshop from the layout area.

Why maple?  The short version is that all of the fir plywood we could find at the usual home improvement stores yesterday was severely warped.  Not just in one dimension, but twisted in both dimensions.  AC-grade fir was $44/sheet, and all twisty.  Good maple plywood was $50/sheet, and flat as could be.  For 6 bucks a sheet, I decided to go with flat.  The side benefit being that I’m going to have some rockin’ awesome looking benchwork that nobody will ever see once I get the layout up.

The first construction to go up will be the section under Cordova and McCarthy, then the peninsulas out to Kennicott and the Cordova wharf, and then we’ll start building along the back (east) wall.  Once I can put the start of the Cordova yard back in place, I’ll be able to clean out the rest of the room and make space to actually construct the rest of the framing.  Until then, all of the construction is being done in the garage by kicking the cars out for a few hours.

Here’s the first piece of open grid support, which will go under Cordova.