Well picked I up an extra bit of ally at 4:00 and got into the drawers. Got a lot further tan you expected (probably on account of stilll hard at it while most of you had your slippers on). Everything has gone well and according to plan, but have a couple of minor adjustments to do. I love this Cubelock tguff, so easy to do stuff with it...
So anyway here are a couple of teaser photos:
When you work with this Cubelock, you got to do up a 3d sketch something like this. This is not the actual plan I worked to but I had scanned it along the way so here it is..
Once I draw this up, I then put a symbol (eg, circle, square, triangle etc) on each join that represents the connector type, (2, way, 3 way, 4 way etc, there is about 6 types) That way you can add them up so you know what to order.
The advantage of using Aluminium is that you can cut it with a wood saw (even 6mm thick stuff is no worries) but you have to make sure that you can do square cuts to use the Cubelock. I started my last project with a hack saw and bought a Ozito drop saw fairly quickly which I broke in about an hour so I took it back and bought a Ryobi 215mm one from Bunnings for about $100. When working with Cubleock, remember that it is 25.4 mm (1") square.
You can cut Ally with any type of wood saw blade even very coarse ones (provided you let the blade spin up to speed before cutting, I used a 24 tooth rip saw blade last time) but I sprung for a 60 tooth aluminium blade this time which is much better.. (cost about $60) But if you had a 60-80 tooth blade, I'd give it a go.
All you need to do with Cubelock is to cut out the lengths and knock it together with a rubber hammer. Because you are always building a cube, once you muck about and get the right dimension, you often need to cut quite a few pieces exactly the same length. I have found you just use one piece as a measuring stick on top of what you are cutting press it up against the stationeray saw blade, remove the measuring stick and go for it!
Anyway, here is what I got done this afternoon:
Don't worry about the lopsided top rails, they are just sitting there and not knocked down into place as they'll have to come out again a few times and a couple of the side rails are not in place yet.
If you look carefuly, you will see that I have the bottom rails resting on three of the raised strips in the tub. The plan is to mount the drawer runners onto the 160mm x 6 mm ally side picees and these are resting on the tub so hter is no weight being taken by the Cubelock and it's plastic connectors. I was a bit concerned about the middle runner as with the 2 x 6mm flat bars, it is wider than the raised strip and I could not work out what to do but I had a brain wave this morning on the way to work and picked up another strip of 6mm x 40mm bar (4 metres long) and cut the centre legs 6mm shorter than the side legs. The centre rail is 25.4mm + 6mm + 6mm wide (37.4mm) so it will fit nicely on the 40mm wide bar.
At the moment, the bolts are finger tight and I will cut off the bolts eventually and replace the nuts with Nyloc ones, but all this will need to be pulled apart again. The drawer slides I will use will either be 19mm or 25mm wide so there will be no problem with clearnce for the bolt heads.
Note that when I drilled the holes in the flat plate, I stacked the 4 pieces on top of each other, centrepunched ach hole positon, G clamped them onto the work banch and drilled them all at once with an electric hand drill rather than my bench press. This worked quite well.
Anyway, If you follow this design, I can tell you now that the critical measurement is the one between the side rails and the centre rail and the magic length is 475mm. The Cubleock piece from the side rail to the edge of the tub is 220mm and that will give you a nice snug fit accross the tray.
Anyway, off to Ovesco at Nerang first thing in the morning and hopefully, I will come home with some drawer slides (provided I like the Occo ones when I see them)