Saw VI: The Final Straw

I was going to write this last night, but I was as tired as a really tired guy, and I figured nobody ever reads these until the next day anyway. So this is yesterday I'm talking about. Because today has only just barely started happening.

It's all cabinet antics again. Because that was so interesting the first time. With our pieces all cut out, yesterday Sean and I spent hours trying to assemble the damned thing. And... Um... it didn't go... well. At all. In fact it went the opposite of well. It went badly.

Actually... It STARTED well... We wanted the cabinet door to have a little depth to it, because flat things don't catch the light in interesting ways. Nooks and crannies are gold on camera. With a little wood glue and thirty seconds of pressure (times four) the cabinet door went together a treat.

He's either playing an invisible Nintendo 64 or initiating a thumb war with himself...

We then moved on to cutting a few little support cubes. To nail into the corners and strengthen the whole deal. That went smooth as you please.

Any carpenters who read this... because I'm sure an independent fantasy film for children has carpenter fans... were probably aghast when they saw the kind of saw we were doing that cutting with before. A jigsaw is NOT the kind of tool you want to use to be cutting the angled ends one desires when assembling a cabinet. And there's a reason for that. It's because it does a crappy job. It's hard to keep a saw like that cutting in a straight line, and the blade bends as well, so you can't keep it straight going the other way, either. Sadly, it's the only saw we had available to us.

So after we'd cut out our cubes, we tried assembling the whole thing. But we had our boards from the day before with double your pleasure Double-crooked Cuts, and those don't fit together in the way you like to see.

We showed this to Norm Abram. And now he's dead. Contact embarrassment...

Not very nice at all. And as you can see, the quite-square door does not fit over this wonky, ghetto cabinet. The problem was that the cuts started out at a forty-five degree angle, but that bendy saw blade ensured that they were not CONSISTENTLY forty-five degrees. So the inside corners of the cuts butted up against each other and kept the cabinet from being the correct width and height for the not-as-sucky door.

After a disassemble and a failed attempt to plane against the grain on composite boards, Sean decided it was time to break out the saw again. He wanted to hack at those corners so that we could get those boards fitting together in a better way. And so hack he did. Seriously, I mean hack. Ugliest cuts that have ever been seen on a prominent piece of movie furniture. Except for maybe Nicolas Cage's abs...

Straight line? No... I'm afraid I'm not familiar with this concept...

But it actually did the trick. The corners went together in a pretty clean fashion. Well... As clean as could be expected under the circumstances. And cleaner than they were before.

Oh. I forgot. Somewhere in the middle of this the creepy ice cream man went by.

Father Fitzpatrick sure drives a weird car, mom...

Sean proved a little garbage at nailing the pieces together and he got tired of me telling him how garbage he was at nailing the pieces together so he made me nail the pieces together. My own nailing turned out to be only slightly less garbage. Not quite as garbage as the wood we were using... But in the end, we wound up with something sort of okay.

It's not pretty, but it will definitely hold a hat. And also... Um... The Wicked Witch of the West is a cruel taskmaster, who made her Winkie slaves build this cabinet without providing them with the proper tools. Under such conditions, the Winkies hastily slapped together a cabinet without all their trademark craftsmanship... So see, it's like that on PURPOSE...

The door's not actually attached yet, and we want to age it and do a few other things before we put it on camera tomorrow. On camera tomorrow for a grand total of two shots, I remind you... More on this story as it develops.