A Shipwright in Training

Here’s a photo of my friend Jessie and I on our 1st day of school. Awww…

And here’s a photo of the various joints we built.

Clockwise from the upper right: Dovetail, cross lap, blind mortise, bevel lap, through-mortise, half-lapped dovetail, and half lap.
Today was a good day in the shop. I passed all my safety tests which means that I can use the machine tools in the shop whenever I like. This is a very good thing. I also finished up the wooden joints we’d been asked to make and went on to the next project, a pocket bevel gauge.

This is a nifty little tool that you use to copy an angle. You place your bevel gauge next to the angle you want to copy, fold out the little blade until it’s at the angle of the thing you’re copying, and then leaving the gauge open at that setting, go to your paper or wood and transfer the angle.

In typical IYRS fashion, they gave us a measured drawing of the gauge, a strip of brass, and a copper nail. It was up to us to figure out how to properly cut and assemble this. The end product required cutting, filing, grinding, soldering and peening (hitting the nail with a ball peen side of a ball peen hammer). I’m quite happy with how mine turned out all in all. It looks like a little pocket knife. The 3 tiny dots on it are punch marks I made to identify it as mine.

After school, a number of us went out to the bar one block down and celebrated the end of a good week of work with beer and nachos. Life is good.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Classes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.