[School] Week Two

With two weeks almost over, it is hard to believe how fast time is flying. We are busy from the first moments each day until the last. We start with warmup exercises or continuing to work on projects, then have a brief lecture, and then continue with projects and exercises for the remainder of the day.

In week one, we continued with green woodworking by making rustic stools.

We then continued to slightly more delicate work, making plates and platters for the school's kitchen:

A great sense of acocmplishment surrounded the completion of the stools:

In week two, we started to learn the techniques required for benchwork and joinery. We built straight edges, such as these:

With the ability to detect straight lines, we were able to then construct winding sticks. Most of the students completed those today. They required jointing of edges, gluing up laminations, creating parallel edges, precision cuts, creating bevels with planes, and trimming end grain. In short, many lessons were contained within these deceptively simple tools. As sawing and planing skills progress, we will soon be working on building try squares. It is quite a feeling to use a layout tool, accurate to a thousandth of an inch, which was created by hand!

I am too busy to take many photos, these are also courtesy of Tim Lawson. As we delve deeper into the types of benchwork I am familiar with, I may have more commentary on the topics and the concepts. For now, I can only restate that this is a blast, and I really wish I would have done it long ago. It is incredibly inspiring and rewarding to be among such passionate staff and students.