4 April 2026

A bigger box this time with a panel to cover the whole base, but while most parts have been assembled in minutes, such as the final overlay here, part 61 took a lot more time, and I did not see much of the first session of snooker while working on it. The initial problem was that fitting the bars to take the bearings for the balls just pushed them right inside. I had to dismantle three of them and glue the housing in place in the central tube to stop it sliding. I could have saved a little more time if I had fitted the ball race bearings after reassembling and reading ahead better I would have realised that. The main problem was that once I'd managed to wrangle the 8 bolts into the first motor mount bar, I realised that the second one would not fit as one of the base plates had been flipped, and a cutout for one of the motors was under the already fitted bar. While not to difficult to resolve, it did take a lot of time unbolting all the bolts, reversing the plate, and refitting them again. Need to take a little more care checking alignments in future. Another irritation is the lack of space to actually hold the nuts that the bolts need to fit into. The right angle socket spanner is a good idea, but needs less depth so you can actually get to the nut . I ended up using the pliers and balanced things to get at the ones under the motors.

All in all though that was a nice distracting afternoons work!