Day 4 - Catherine

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Today was a very productive woodworking day as I finally finished all of my cuts and got to do my first glue up. It was a slow start though because Nathaniel and Sayer also had to use the table saw for their projects so I spent the morning catching up on the daily blogs while I waited. I also went around and took a few photos for the blog and had fun watching the other students do their projects. We are all doing very different projects so it is cool to see how other people’s projects are coming together.

After lunch, the table saw was free so I was able to cut the other 20 strips. Towards the last few cuts, I ran out of maple. I had lots of extra maple but it was not cut to 13” like my other strips and I still had to do one more cut at the same thickness so I couldn’t adjust the fence just then to make the maple shorter. I was able to finish cutting the pieces with the longer extra maple but I then had to do cross cuts to get the pieces to the correct length. I made the mistake of running the wood across the blade in the same way I did the rip cuts which you are not supposed to do because the cross-cut goes against the grain of the wood. Luckily, it was a very thin piece of wood so it ended up cutting all the way through without major issues but I made sure to remember to use the crosscut sled for the second cut. When I was done with the table saw, I then planed all 42 pieces. For accuracy and efficiency, I planed all of the pieces of the same thickness at the same time and then lowered the blade gradually for the next cuts which I did in order of decreasing thickness.

Planing so many pieces on both top and bottom took so long that the school day ended before I could do my first glue-up. I wanted to continue working with the power tools on Friday though so I took some clamps, wood glue, and a brush to do the glue-up at home so it would have time to dry overnight and be ready for tomorrow. The glueing process was very messy and the strips have some variation in heights that I am anxious to plane away tomorrow.

all 42 cuts!



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