Dark Times, eh Albus?

"Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose what is easy and what is right." - Albus Dumbledore

So it was inevitable, we finally had some setbacks with the table. The plan was to mount the extensions onto their sliders and then attach the sliders to the frame. We screwed the sliders into one of the extensions and then lined it up on the table... big issue. The sliders we bought are heavy duty side mounting drawer slides, but we had planned on mounting them to the bottom of our extensions. With the extensions fully extended, a large torque is applied to the sliders and was deflecting the ends of the extensions down (imagine floppy extensions that will get worse as time goes on until they break). The sliders themselves are built to handle a large moment, but not in the direction we were attempting to use them (should be vertical, not sideways). So we were faced with choice, move ahead and deal with a droopy table, or redesign. I think we know what Dumbledore would choose.

We took the mounting surfaces off the frame(long pieces of 6" thick particle board), and will now side-mount the drawer slides. The width of the sliders is .5" and the width of the frame is 24", which means our extensions have to be 23" wide. We cut them to be ~23" before, just to give us some margin when doing the bottom mount. Perfect, right? Wrong. When cutting the extensions, we weren't being precise, because we didn't have to be. The extensions now measure 23.005" wide, which means they don't fit. Paul and I will be sanding the excess off tonight and hopefully resuming our quest.

Because we had designed the height of the frame to fit the extensions within 1/8" of the table top, we now have the issue of getting the extensions close to the table surface. We need the two to be as close as possible so that when in beerpong mode, the the cups aren't too far below the surface of the table. We'll probably fudge this as we mount the sliders, by either adding thickness to the extensions or removing thickness from the frame.

Couple more tidbits:
-We seem to have figured out our deadstop issue. We needed a way to keep the extensions all the way out while in beerpong mode. Should be tight.
-Got 4/5 of our ibuttons in the mail. Thanks, Dallas-Maxim Semiconductors, for not realizing that 5 different people ordered free samples on the same day to the same address.
-Going to attach several more cross supports to the frame to ensure everything is stable. NBD.

We should have things mounted tonight, maybe even the spring system in place.... ooooo. Pictures to follow.