Step one: cut the angle iron to length. A couple of months before I moved to China, I had a whole lot of tools stolen. That saved me from having to store them, and also meant that I got to go buy a whle lot more after moving into this garage. I won't post tool porn pictures, but I went and got a Maktec (Makita's "generic" line) abrasive cutoff saw. 2 kilowatts of steel cutting power, it'll go through pretty much anything I can carry home. Thank you, nameless junky, for giving me an excuse to buy power tools.
Cut to length and marked for bolt holes. The install OCD kicked in, and I had to rego everything for the transfer. Even though I'm going to weld the frame together, and it's only ever moving in one piece with a forklift. Still, this way when I take the pieces over and drill them and put them to one side and go away for a few days and come back and think "Where was I?", I'll know exactly where they go. Not that I've done that before....
Did I mention rego everything?
Bolt holes drilled. They're drilled to the size I'll need for the wood, not the steel. Because I'm using coach screws, the holes in the steel need to be larger than the holes in the wood, so that the thread can pass through the steel but bite the wood. So the plan is to predrill the steel while I can get it in the press, then weld it all together, drill the wood, then enlarge the holes in the steel. We'll see how that goes....
Step 2: cut the gal. I want the gal to form both the lengthwise pieces of the frame, and get a crosspiece out of them. So the sensible thing to do is work out how long the crosspieces need to be, cut one off each length, and then use what's left as is. I don't mind having the legs a foot in from the end, it's more crucial to have the crosspieces close to the edges.
Laying out the gal as a lengthwise piece so I can mark the distance between them for the crosspieces.
Crosspieces cut, remainder laid out. Turns out the angle iron moved in maybe 20mm each side from the edge marks, so that's pretty much ideal. It's beginning to look a lot like a workbench. In fact, the next step is to weld it all up, put some legs on it, and screw the wood down. Then I have the fun of working out shelves inside it. Fortunately, the previous tenant seems to have left behind a bunch of planks....
So I bought a welder....