Garden Tower from Woodsmith Vol.31 No. 230

[CalvinG35]

I'm building the garden tower from the latest Woodsmith Magazine for my father, and am looking for some advise for assembly.  Specifically regarding glue up, there vertually no technique described in the article.  First off, it seems that the entire assembly is completely dependent of glue (the only nail/fasteners mention are for the quarter-round in the corners that hold the side together).  Most of the thing I have built use at least a few fasteners, is glue really sufficient?  I know we're not building anything that's going to take a load here, buy it seems heavily dependent on glue.  Second for the glue up process for each individual side, is it best to glue everything together at once (which is a whole lot of surfaces, including two very long center supports that essentially need to be laminated together.

Any help or advice is appreciated.

Karl

[fredhargis]

What they described will be sufficient. You glue the side assemblies together sing that frame they show, and then turn the 4 sides into the tower with the SS nails and glue. The same issue has an article on water resistant glues that should prove useful. For those sides, you can probably do the glue up in stages using their frame. Assemble the frame first, then put the lattice strips in later. If you want to glue the 2 center pieces together first, go ahead and do that, then your frame assembly would be only 4 pieces. I would try a dry fit first and see how it goes, then do it again but with the  glue.