Advanced Woodworking A-Term

Today was the last day of the Advanced Woodworking A-term and for us seniors the last day of Post Oak J/A Terms as a whole... On another note, I finally finished my cutting board! I had to veer a little from the original design but all in all, I am very happy with the final product and learned a lot in the process. I started the day by gluing the handle back onto the cutting board with the longer clamps at school. This glue-up called for an additional extremely long waiting period for the glue to dry. Since I couldn’t finish my project just then I spent the morning roaming around the Tinkeria, watching Sutton try to saw off the excess wood from her project, and even started making the A-Term Presentation slides in an attempt to make the glue dry faster. By the time we finished our lunch break, my cutting board was dry enough for the next step. Recalling yesterday’s incident, I hesitantly approached the router again. Mr. Grisbee wisely decided to stand on the left side of the router thi...

Well, let it be known to all that A-Term 2021 is officially over which means I have one A-Term left in my entire life. What a heavy thought to end the day.  My last day of the Advanced Wood Working course started at 8:30am on the dot as there was absolutely no time to waste. My first task was to use a tiny, thin saw to chop the excess Babinga wood off of the splined miter joints. This grueling process was most definitely the worst two hours of my life, and that is coming from the same girl who had also gotten her first fender bender in front of the entire high school two days before. It was truly awful. When Mr. Grisbee was demonstrating, he looked like he was cutting butter and made it seem so smooth and simple. When I tried, however, it was like I was chopping into solid graphene (which, if you didn't know, is the strongest material in the world). Not only this, but I had to stand outside in the 100% humidity while wearing a mask and a very thick t-shirt. Mr. Grisbee kept telling...

 

Between design changes, planing, working with new power tools, and all of the accidents in between, it was quite a day. The first thing when I walked into the Tinkeria this morning was to check to see if the pieces had gotten any straighter. They did not. However, I was able to flip some of the pieces in a way that their uneven edges fit perfectly together and created a board that is straight –to the unsuspecting naked eye. I then glued all of the pieces of the board together. Interestingly enough, even though I removed several of the middle pieces from the original pattern, my board was still a 13”x13” square. As I was gluing the board, another piece broke off and I spot glued it but apparently not well enough because there ended up being a millimeter gap in between that the glue had already set in place. There was also one piece that jutted out significantly higher than the rest and could not be fixed either. I wanted the board length to be 12” with a decent-sized handle which meant ...

Now the last blog implied that the project was done, but it wasn't, the primary assembly was done. Day 7 was relegated primarily to tidying it up and applying edge banding. Which is a lot harder than you'd think. You have to press down a thin veneer with a hot iron and if you screw it up by any more than 1/16" you gotta do it again loser. I used probably double the material I needed to due to stupid mistakes, but it doesn't matter, I got it done eventually.      Once the edge banding was finished, I needed to do one of the final steps, sanding the whole thing down. This was probably the most stressful step and a lot of the edge banding was screwed up by my imprecision or tendency towards mistakes in general. However, that step was finished with the shelf intact and thank god for it because that was stressful. I was sorta left to myself for a good while until it was finally time to attach the backing. Now the backing was cut from this massive floppy 1/8" plywood bo...

 Day 6 was a day spent making a lot of progress on the shelf. The primary thing that was done for the majority of day 6 was rabbet adjustment. A lot of my rabbets were mediocre at best and needed to be trimmed down to size. After a lot of sanding and utilization of the router table, my rabbets were fixed. After that, I needed to use the router table for something else. So my shelf was designed to have a 1/8" backing, so we needed to cut out a hole to fit that backing into. the router table would allow me to cut a rabbet into the wood so I could fit the backing on there. However as it just so happens my brain is small and I am stupid, so I cut on the wrong side. This major mistake was noticed by Mr Grisbee and I a few seconds after it was done, we decided it might just be better to saw off that little chunk that I did and shorten the shelf by 1/8". This was relatively easy to do so we did it. After that came lunch. Once lunch ended it came to the ultimate final act of the day,...

Today was full of adventures, accidents, "aww man's," and adjustments to the design of my dog bowl stand. A lot happened over the past seven hours, and I will fill you in as best I can.  Immediately after setting down my belongings, I untaped the joints of the dog bowl stand. The miter joints turned out as well as humanly possible and, with a little glue, sawdust, and sanding, they will look great. I then measured the inner side of the stand so I could trim down the maple piece. I used the table saw and carefully made my cut. I ended up needing to go back and trim it down hair-by-hair so that it slid in perfectly. Somehow, I trimmed it one hair too many, and now there is a slight gap on the side. This may seem like a slight problem, but it will seem like nothing when you compare to the other drama I will explain shortly.  I then spoke with Mr. Grisbee about enhancing the upper portion of the stand so that the maple piece is slightly inward and has a curve. I chose my favo...