Even though this looks like much the same photo I took of the layout benchwork yesterday, it’s a do-over, because an unwritten but widely acknowledged law of the universe clearly states that we can’t have it exactly right the first time, can we?

In point of fact, the big doughnut I cut out and glued together yesterday was exactly, but exactly as big as I meant to make it: sixty inches across. The reason I had to rebuild it was not because the Big Cosmic F.U. reached in and bumped my elbow to make me gank up an angle or cut a board too short. No, what happened was that, for reasons I can’t quite wrap my head around, I figured that the doughnut had to be sixty inches across. That was not correct. The doughnut had to be sixty-nine inches across, and the difference is significant enough that I could not fudge it, alter the plan just a little bit and use the sixty-inch doughnut after all. There will be no fudging going on here. I’m sticking to the plan.

So, after I pulled my head completely out of my ass – knock wood – I revved up the table saw again and ripped another two-by-four sheet of plywood into eight-inch-wide lengths, then chopped them up into angled pieces with the miter saw and glued them together to make the much wider doughnut that you see in the updated photo. And now I’ve got a roadbed that matches the plan of the layout, and all will be well. Huzzah.