Dry Assembling the staves

The staves can now be dry assembled to check the fit of the bevels before gluing.

	The staves are held together with cheap luggage straps that should be available at hardware and outdoor stores. Tighten the straps by hand, then with the aid of two offcuts of wood, push the edges of the straps down the drum shell to further tighten the fit. It would help if you had an octopus on hand to hold the staves while you are assembling them. I seem to manage with just two hands, but it take patience.
	Since then, I have made this simple stand to help hold the staves until I can get a strap around them. The base of the stand needs work (a heavy round disk would be best.).

The staves are held together with cheap luggage straps that should be available at hardware and outdoor stores. Tighten the straps by hand, then with the aid of two offcuts of wood, push the edges of the straps down the drum shell to further tighten the fit.

It would help if you had an octopus on hand to hold the staves while you are assembling them. I seem to manage with just two hands, but it take patience.

Since then, I have made this simple stand to help hold the staves until I can get a strap around them.

The base of the stand needs work (a heavy round disk would be best.).

Here's another method of assembling and clamping the staves.

The joints should be as tight as possible, as the glue will not fill wide gaps. With the straps tightened, hold the drum up to the light so that you can see along the plane of the joints between staves. Anything more than a paper-thin gap and you should probably use a jointer, or a hand plane to adjust the bevel.

I found at this point that my router bit was not cutting a perfect 15 degree bevel. I'm pretty sure the router cutter bit is engineered to fine tolerances, so I can only guess that the router is not held perfectly vertical. I loosened the router and packed a very thin shim between it and the router table to lean the cutter ever-so-slightly away from the wood (to increase the angle a bit). I then ran the staves over the router and dry assembled again. After two iterations of this I was reasonably happy with the fit.

Sadly I hit another minor problem, three of the staves had a small warp in them. The warp was only about 3-4mm in the middle of the stave, but this did make the bevels, and the ultimate fit, a bit difficult. So I had a go at bending the staves to remove the warp.

Step 5:Gluing the Staves

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