Week One, Thursday: In which I do multiple things

This was another really intense day.  I'm not sure I even remember everything we did.

First we had a demonstration of cutting dovetail joints - the tails in one side, the pins in the other.  Then we prepared two pieces of wood (poplar) to use to practice our own dovetails.

Open dovetail joint

A dovetail is a very traditional joint.  In fact, the instructor mentioned that, although techniques have changed, the joints we use today are, for the most part, no different than they were 300 years ago.  We just have better tools and other materials now.

Other than aesthetics, why would we want to use a dovetail joint?  Consider the construction of a drawer.  The basic drawer comprises two sides, a front, a back, and a bottom.  Forget about the bottom, and think about the stresses put on the sides and front of a drawer as it is pulled out of the encompassing framework.  If you built it just of glued up pieces of wood, it probably wouldn't last very long.  No matter how you put it together, the joint between the front and each of the sides is put together with the long grain of the wood in the side pieces being attached to the end grain of the front (or the reverse).  Any gluing to end grain is bound to fail if it relies just on glue, even with modern adhesives.  The joint was created when animal protean glues (such as hide glue) were all that was available.  Because of the way that the dovetail is made, there are built-in long grain to long grain connections which are much stronger than long grain to end grain. In addition, once properly assembled, the pins on the front of the drawer are captured by the tails on the sides, and this provides the additional benefit of mechanical strength.

OK, more than you wanted to know.  But I'm showing off the kind of things I am learning here.  Until this week, I never considered why you would want dovetails.  I just knew that a dovetailed drawer was a sign of better craftsmanship when I went furniture shopping.

We had a demonstration/lecture on planes: types, history, disassembly, sharpening, reassembling, using, where you would use what type of plane.  None of this was new, but it's the first time it's all been put together for me.

I have a brand new plane of a particular type. (For you woodworkers, it's a Lie Nielsen Low Angle Jack Plane.) I am glad to have it, but was almost afraid to use it.  It was still in its shipping box with the paper padding,  The plane blades were still wrapped in protective paper.  It's an expensive device that I purchased just for this class, and I didn't want to do anything to misuse it.  So today was its unwrapping.

In the afternoon we saw a demo of flattening and smoothing one side of a rough-cut board, and were then given our own board to flatten.  I'm happy to tell you that the plane performed wonderfully.  I am very pleased with it.  And, the board I prepared passed all the checks and measurements I could perform, and appeared to me to be flat, twist free, and smooth.

In the meantime, I worked in a practice dovetail joint.  This is not the first time I have done dovetails, but I still need a lot of practice.

We also discussed our first project. Next week will be spent designing and building whatever it is that we decide to make, given the criteria that it must have dovetails and mortise and tenon joints, and at least one of the boards in the project must have been flattened by hand.  The example project is a small bench, but we are not constrained to building that.  The real constraint is time.

The example project - a small bench

We knocked off a little early this afternoon - 6 PM - in order to participate in the weekly pot-luck dinner.  My contribution was a watermelon I bought last night.  It had been in the refrigerator all day and was quite good, although not as popular as the various decadent chocolate concoctions others had contributed.

But the main(e) attraction was Lobster and corn-on-the-cob.

After dinner, the school director organized a game of cutthroat croquet.

The lobster and the croquet are evidently weekly traditions.  One of my classmates, who is camping on the school grounds (he's an ex-Marine, so we'll forgive him) said this was the first real meal he'd had since Sunday.  I didn't admit that I could probably say the same thing except for the sandwiches I've been buying at the local market.

Anyway, it was a good time and a lot of fun, and something to look forward to in coming weeks.