The first thing I did was mark where I would cut out the blocks from the piece of spruce I had. The grain of the wood has to go a certain direction at an angle. This makes the blocks stronger. I used a band saw to cut out the blocks. The spruce I was working with was very thick, and I got a little too aggressive with a corner turn and popped the band saw blade off right away! Woops! At least I didn't break anything.
After I cut out the blocks, I had to plane all the corners to the exact height and make them all perfectly square on all corners. Because I have bad hands right now, I am unable to use a hand plane for this step. I leveled the disk on my belt sander using a small square, and then I used the disk sander to sand the blocks to the correct measurements. That is unbelievably difficult to accomplish because there is not a square side at all when you first cut out the blocks, and once one side is square, you can't tilt the block even a tiny bit or you'll throw off the squareness on a different corner. I was dealing with measurements of 31.2 mm and 31.8 mm, so I had to be very careful when I got close to the correct measurement. One block broke when I got it close, so I had to do that one over.
After all the blocks were cut out, sanded to the correct measurements and squared, I glued them to the mold. The mold has to be 7 mm above a perfectly flat surface for this step. I used a piece of thick safety glass with two wooden risers that are exactly 7 mm in height. I placed the mold on top of the wooden risers. Here is what it looks like now. You can see in one of these pictures how the metal template fits on the steel pins and over the top of the mold.
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