Posts for the two veils
There are a total of nine posts in the Tabernacle itself. Five hold up the veil at the entrance and four hold up the veil before the Most Holy Place. The kids glued a base and crown onto each post as described in Exodus. The posts that hold the veil for the Holy of Holies do not have crowns on the top. Interesting. I’m not sure why. After this, each one was painted according to the Biblical description.
 | Gluing the post onto the base. The posts for the veils are ready to glue down. You can see the hooks attached to the top of the posts for hanging the veils. We took a cheap gold colored bracelet that had some sort of dangles hanging from it, cut it apart, and tied these in holes drilled near the top of the post. Hanging the veils from these will present a more ornate look. You can also see the walls in this photo. They are painted with the wire staples and rods in place. To provide accessibility to the inside of the Tabernacle, they are not glued in place until later on.
|  The posts for the veils glued in place. | |
Gluing these post in place proved to be tricky. The fact that they are lined up side by side exposes any irregularities. Any part of the post, base or cap not cut or sanded correctly shows up as being out of line or not parallel with the other posts. We worked hard to get these in line as close as possible but even then they were not perfect. One mistake here was where I used two pieces of ¼ inch plywood from my scrap box to raise the floor of the Tabernacle. I did this so that the sand to be applied later would come up to the bottom of the previously made cuts made in the base. One piece of plywood should have been used instead of two since the two pieces may not have glued down perfectly level.
Posts for the courtyard fence
 |
About this same time, the kids also glued the base and caps onto the posts for the courtyard fence. Before gluing on the caps, we cut small grooves across the top of the posts and laid small wire “hooks” into these grooves. These hooks were made from inexpensive jewelry wire found in craft stores. I took short pieces of wire and twisted a loop on each end. The caps are glued to the top of the post over these “hooks”. Later on, after the posts and courtyard fence are in place, we will run guide ropes (we will use an off white color embroidery string) from these hooks to tent stakes (¾ inch wire nails) driven into the board.
Painting the courtyard post. You can see the groove cut into the top of the post for the wire hook to lay in. The cap will then be glued over this and painted silver. These will be glued to the board later on. Test fitting the walls
After the boards were painted and the base was finished, we made a test fit of the walls. This was to make sure they would go in their respective grooves and line up properly. We did not glue them in place at this time because it would be a lot easier to install the furnishings with the walls out of the way.
We are just making sure everything lines up here. No glue
There are a number of things you can see here. One is the ugly smudges showing up on the gold paint. We will fix that later. If you look closely you can see the two pieces of plywood on the floor of the Tabernacle that was mentioned above. The joint runs the length of the Tabernacle. Also on the back wall there are two boards at each end that are not yet painted. Here an extra board was added for two reasons. First of all, Exodus 26:23-24 indicates that the back corners have double boards. The other reason is to provide some extra surface area for gluing the side walls to the back wall which will strengthen the unit.
In these two photos, the posts are in place, but the walls will come back down to allow easier access to finish working inside the Tabernacle.
