Wood?

Today it seemed like we were trying to make up for not being at school yesterday (Columbus Day). The pace was fast and furious with a lot of knowledge gained and a small personal achievement.

What is a naturally occurring unidirectional, reinforced and laminated composite material? If you guessed wood then you would be correct.  In morning lecture, Ray gave the first of a series of sessions on Wood Technology. Without the knowledge of the materials used in boat building our newly found woodworking skills would definitely be wasted. Some of the considerations in choosing wood for boat building are: availability, durability (i.e, rot resistant), suitability (where you are going to use it) and weatherability. We learned that the best boards for hulls, decking, etc. is vertical grain (or VG) which has about half the shrinkage as flat grain boards. Defects to consider when looking at wood are: knots, checks, shakes, pitch pockets, thunder shakes, stain and a minimal amount of sap wood. One last interesting note...one of the reasons that boat building flourished in the Pacific Northwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is due to the availability of old-growth wood. More to come...

In the shop we had a demonstration on the use of the drill press which would be used in the primary project for the day.  Not much to say...tighten the chuck, use a sacrificial piece of wood, clamp your work down and use multiple passes to drill through the material.

The project for the day was to build by hand a bevel gauge. A bevel gauge is a tool used to find the degree of a bevel (say on a boat) and then be able to easily transfer that bevel somewhere else (say the bandsaw). Given a small piece of stock; we had to carefully cut a kerf to allow the blade to retract into the body of the stock, cut a piece of brass at a forty-five degree angle, drill through the stock and brass, and then insert and peen a brass pin. Sounds easy. My first try failed miserably when the pin shattered the wood. Second try...was beautiful. Probably the closest I have come to completing a project so far that actually looks good! A small victory but a victory nonetheless. To say that I was happy today would be an understatement. Maybe there is a woodworker lurking inside of me. Only time will tell.