With the body completed (and after LOTS of sanding of the inside to try to get it straight), I"m ready to move on. With all of the gaps in the interior of this plywood, and the porous nature of the wood itself, it's become obvious to me that I'll need to line this with a smooth, non-porous material. I happen to have the perfect material on hand- some aluminum flashing that I picked up cheap at an estate auction some year ago. I used a bunch of it when rebuilding my shop, but still have quite a bit left.

Above, I'm making a template- this was quite simple. I just cut some posterboard to rough size (and note that even this is recycled- some old medical advertising posters), then put it in the body, and traced it with a superfine sharpie.



After cutting to the lines, it's almost a perfect fit. This was easy to fix on the actual lining. (sorry about the double pic :()

And here we have the lining- my old camera had trouble getting a good focus on it. I cut the straight parts with a straightedge and utility knife, the curved parts with snips, then gently cleaned up the burrs on my 1" belt sander.

Here the lining is being epoxied in. The one clamp is enough to hold it- the spring in the metal did most of the work here. The hole for the intake was easy to cut- while making the paper template, I stuck a scrap of the same material in and sprayed black paint through the hole to get the shape. When I test fit the lining, I traced it with a sharpie, then used the painted template to get it perfect, then cut the whole thing out on the scroll saw. After that, it was just a matter of lining it up on installation.

I tried trimming the excess with an old wood chisel, but that didn't work to my satisfaction. Then I tried using a hacksaw with a steel-cutting blade in it, and that turned out to be the ideal tool for the job- you just have to be careful to take short strokes against the body so that you don't pull it loose- the excess will just curl away. Kind of fun, actually :)

As you can see, even with a lot of sanding and work, I still didn't get the interior perfectly straight- there was still a signifigant gap between the lining and body at the bottom. I filled this with silicon sealer, and it seems to be working fine. I built the body in a hurry, and it caused me a lot of problems and extra work. If I ever build another one of these, I'll take a lot more care in this process.