Things to be Thankful For

I was reflecting on all the things I have to be thankful for and there were many things that happened that I could not have done without help from others.  I would like to take a moment and say thanks to the many that have made my projects possible this year.  Many people have donated wood and supplies to help with my toy donation projects.  This year we had a donation of over 1000 board feet of lumber from RSI Holdings to the club that I go to.  This was crucial in helping make the 190 toys that I donated this year.  That was about eight times more than I usually am able to.

I would like to also thank the support I receive from online supporters.  It has been nice to have people purchase plans from me.  This year has been extra special because people are now starting to share their finished projects with me.  It is such a rewarding feeling when others have made projects that I have designed and talk about the things that they liked and what they have changed.  I am actually putting more customer pictures on the blog.

I am grateful for the support that I receive from others.  I have started a class this year.  It is going well.  I appreciate the patience my students have in me as I work out the details and suffer through some of the boring parts that I have realized are not important to the class objectives.

There are also others that have helped me with my crazy idea of being published.  I am amazed that someone would let me barrow photography equipment knowing that it is going to be used in a dusty environment.  I have been careful, the garage is still dusty. 

I am especially grateful for my wife who supports me through all of these things.  She has been very supportive of different ideas and time commitments I have.  

Little Vehicle Series

I decided that I needed to expand the little vehicle series by three more.  This makes it an even ten vehicles.  The ambulance was a simple design, my son wanted a cement truck, and I wanted to do a forklift.  That is where the designs came from.

First, the easy one.  The ambulance is pretty straight forward and can be made into a box truck.  There really is not much too the design.

The forklift was much more challenging.  The biggest struggle was the proportions.  It was either too big, too long or just did not look right.  I wanted something were I did not have to use a scroll saw and could be cut out with a table saw and chop saw.  Overall, I am happy how it turned out.  I will say, having a hand plane really helped out on flattening the dowel and adding the profiles.

The impossible request was the cement truck.  I could not figure out how I was going to make it.  I do not have a lathe which means that I was going to use a dowel.  I was not sure how the bucket was going to be attached and then there was the size.  I first established my constraints, the chassis was 2 ½” wide and max 4.5” long.  The largest dowel I can buy was 2” at the big box store.  This is why I love to design in the 3d modeling world with good software.  I learned quickly that I could match angles with the barrel supports and using constraints, I could determine the angle and the distance that would result in measurements that were 1/8” or larger.  Then I had the structural concerns.  I doweled a lot of the pieces.  I did not worry about how I was going to make all the parts until that time came, and I procrastinated it.

Toughest part was the barrel.  I ended up setting my band saw at 45 degrees and putting in stop blocks.  It turned out easier than I expected and safer than a router which was my first thought.  I then needed to do the same setup with the belt sander.  This also took time to finish because I needed to tape off a lot of parts.  It came out well and my son is happy.

Week 6

This was the introduction to the scroll saw.  The project is cutting out puzzles. I need to reevaluate the last set of lessons.  The lectures are over their heads and I don't think they are beneficial.  I need to show how I do setups and tricks that I have learned.  I cannot expect them to ask me how to do something.  I will start taking more time to do setups and explanation of the processes.

There were some people that gravitated to the scroll saw.  There is more of an excitement with the projects and it is fun to watch them work on projects.

This was the first time I had five of the six students.  I usually have 3-4 students due to schedules.  I am glad I capped the class at 6 students.  It was kind of crazy with all the students but it was an organized chaos.

Week 5

This was the first introduction to power tools.  It makes drilling the holes in the car launcher easier to do.  Overall the class did well on how to use a drill press. I found out that measuring and marking the holes was a challenge.  We used ruled square to mark all the holes.  Some of the marking issues were:

• Marking the dimension on the wrong side of the part
• putting tick marks on the edges of the part and then free handing them to where they crossed
• setting up with the wrong dimension

This is were I am learning that I need to be more demonstrative on the techniques than pictures.

Week 4

Week 4 was basic hand tools.  I went through some of the common hand tools and their uses.  They were able to use some.  The project assigned was the car launcher that my son designed and made for the triton tool competition and won.  Their assignment was to make this launcher from the miter box they made the previous week.  I am learning that I have a lot of information and some of it may be useful and most of it is boring.  I am not her to convince them to be wood workers but to learn some design and some tools and some project planning.