First days at school
First weeks at school are usually pretty easy, and it’s been about par for the course here as well. The first week they do a lot of reading the shop safety manual out loud to us and then showing us the various power tools we’ll be expected to operate. It’s not all review, though, becuase I’m realizing that when I’m in a shop I’m not usually thinking about the safety of other people. For instance, they want us to be particularly mindful of areas known as “kickback zones” behind certain tools… well first of all, I don’t get kickback because I know how to operate a saw, but it’s becoming clear to me that I need to be mindful of this zone when other people are using the saw… I could get hurt by someone else being a bozo. I also am thinking more about how my actions could affect someone else, and that’s a change. Normally it’s just me in the shop.
I’ve started to make friends with some of the other students. Jessie is a fellow 1st year, and she and her sweetie live 2 houses away from me. She’s been out of the Air Force for about a year where she was a vehicle mechanic and had been doing welding repair work on trains since then. It drove her nuts, so she came here to learn a more satisfying skill, but she’s dead green to the whole woodworking thing.
The IYRS teaching style is pretty much a “show them the basics and toss ‘em in…” this works fine for me and other folks with some woodworking background, but some of the students, like Jessie, are using their tools for the first time. I think they need some improvement in how they handle these kinds of students (there are a number of them) and get them up to speed.
So, first days…
Yesterday we spent the afternoon sharpening tools since many of the students were using their chisels and planes for the very first time. There wasn’t nearly enough time to do it well, and a lot of folks were frustrated by the process. I went in early today with Jessie to help her get a couple of her chisels in shape, and we’ll do that again for the next couple of days. Today we were given a number of joints to cut / chisel. Again, it was “here’s the joints, start on them and I’ll be coming around to check on your work.” A number of us just got right to work, and I had a friendly competition with a fellow across the bench from me about the tightness of our joints. We’ve both got a perfectionist streak and we want to make seamless, perfect examples of each joint. I did well, but it’s humbling really to do what you think will work and realize you missed keeping an edge perfectly square so that the joint is off by a half-pencil width. I know, not much, but when you get a perfect crisp joint, that looks like a chasm. Today we did a simple half-lap and half lap dovetail, a blind mortise and tenon (i.e., one where the tenon does not stick all the way through the mortise), and a bevel lap joint. Tomorrow we’ll do some dovetails, and a through mortise and tenon joint.
I think the primary purpose of this exercise is to get students just using their tools and to see who knows what they’re doing.
So, the next few days will involve a lot of subtle guiding for Jessie and some of the other newbies (I don’t want to step on the instructor’s toes). There’s no way they’ll get to the level of the more advanced students, but they can at least get to the level where they know what needs to be done to progress.
Jan just left today. She’s been here since Friday morning and it’s been really nice seeing her. We visited one of the Newport mansions, and since I’ve been in school she’s visited 4 others (The Breakers, Marble House, Chateau-sur-Mer, and Rosecliff). Holy cats… that’s a lot of mansions. The truly amazing thing is that these insanely large, lavishly decorated places were often only in use for about 6-9 weeks out of the year.
Those are the kinds of people who will be buying the boats I’m going to be building.