Assembling the end frames

First off, I would like to wish you all a happy Valentine's Day! With that out of the way, it is now time to begin the first real bit of assembly. Here, I am going to join two pairs of legs together with the short horizontal supports I cut to size last time. To start, I laid out all of the pieces as shown below.

The legs are clamped to the pallet to keep them in line.

Once I found the correct positioning of the legs, I clamped them to the pallet below to hold them in place while I glue the crosspieces. In the photo, they are not in their proper location because I moved them away so I could apply glue to both the legs and crosspieces, which is shown below.

Like always, I apply glue to both surfaces and use a spreader to evenly distribute the glue.

For the lower support, I marked in pencil where it needs to go, so that I could accurately put it in place.

Using the pencil lines I drew, I place the crosspiece in it's correct location.

Once in place, I drilled in some screws to apply pressure while the glue dried. I tried to drill the screws directly into the wood, but the wood started to crack, so I decided to drill pilot holes first.

I use screws to keep the wood clamped down. It is always a good idea to consider first drilling pilot holes.

As you can see below, there was quite a bit of glue squeeze-out. Oh well! I'll just have to clean that up before moving onto the next step.

Now it is time to wait for the glue to dry.

One of the things I've learned is that it is easier to let the squeeze-out dry and then use a chisel or sander to remove it, rather than trying to wipe it while wet. This just smears the glue deeper into the wood grains.

I used the same process for the other two legs, which resulted in the lovely Valentine's Day couple you see below!

The finished assemblies! Don't they look cute together?

I know last time I alluded to some challenges. I was referring to something I later discovered about these assemblies, but I will talk about that next time. I don't want to dampen anyone's Valentine's Day with bad news after all!