Assembling the real thing

Today I started to put the rest of the wood together to form the coffin plinth. I fitted the skeleton raising hardware and realised that the force required to lift the skeleton was warping the back panel of the plinth so I added some reinforcing struts.

Here's a pic of the plinth with the lifter bar raised.



And a close up of the lifter bar mounting. The two pieces of wood next to the lifter bar screw into the sheet of wood that covers the innards of the plinth. The helps to further reduce the torsion on the back panel of the plinth.



I also fitted the coffin lid and the lid lifting mechanism. Here the skeleton lifting bar is in the down position with 'Albert' attached.



Here's a video of it working: