Pillar project, phase 2

The next phase of the pillars is finished, cutting and gluing the foam insulation around the frames. I've put more pictures up here.

I severely under estimated the amount of glue it would take to get everything mounted. I ended up using 7 tubes of foamboard project glue. I preferred the stuff I found at Home Depot over the Liquid Nails I picked up at Jerry's. It's called "PL300 Foamboard Adhesive" and comes in a blue labeled tube. The glue is light blue when it comes out. It had a more tacky consistency which helped keep the foam attached to the PVC.

I had to keep weight on the pillars while the glue dried. I came up with a way of distributing the weight across all 5 pillars at the same time by using some boards I had laying around in the garage. This meant I could do 5 sides at a time. It took about 8 hours for a side to completely dry so after about 2 days I had all of the sides done.

After the sides were done I cut small 1 foot by 3 inch strips of foam to surround the tops and bottoms of the pillars, giving them some weight and depth. This process used a bunch of glue. The strips stuck much more readily to other foam and plywood than to the PVC pipes so I didn't have to weight them down before doing the next strip. As I did this it became painfully obvious that my plywood "squares" were far from square and that the PVC frame had not been centered correctly on them. I will have some very irregularly shaped pillars. Maybe it will increase their charm.

I used a coarse sandpaper to shave down any corners of the foam where the sides joined and to smooth out the beady nature of the foam. Cutting the foam with a utility knife left many jagged edges and my garage floor was covered in foam shrapnel by the end of the process.

Tomorrow after all the glue has dried I will start painting them.