woodworking – Montessori Muddle

Chessboard Project

For our annual fundraiser’s silent auction, I made a chess board. The structure was made of wood–I learned how to use dowels to attach the sides–but the black squares were cut out of the material they use for matting the borders of pictures. My student drew “cheat sheet” diagrams of each of the black squares in bright gel pen colors. The squares were laid on a white grid and the entire top epoxied with a clear glass-like coat. We also made two sets of chess pieces with the 3d printer (rounds versus squares).

It turned out quite well.

The Final Product

So I made the guitar. The guitarbuilding group make it hard to make a bad guitar, with the beautiful materials they provide, and their expert instruction, however, I’m inordinately proud of myself as well.

Indeed, as more and more of the elements fell into place over the course of the week, it really brought home the affective power of a) building something with your own hands, and b) the iconography of the electric guitar.

Now I have to figure out the logistics of doing this at Fulton. But as the workshop instructors pointed out, even if you don’t have students build one, just bringing the electric guitar into the classroom and saying, “Today we’re going to study sound,” really catches the attention.

Sculpting the Guitar

Sanding and sculpting the guitar bodies was loud, dusty and took a while.

The shape of an electric guitar’s body does not matter that much–they’ve even been made out of 2×4 (inches) pieces of wood–, so there’s a lot of room for creativity when sculpting your guitar’s shape. There’s a little more restriction for the guitar bodies from the guitarbuilding project because they come with cutouts for the electronics that have to be avoided. However, your main limitation is time.

Even with the big rasp, sculpting is not easy, especially since some of the types of wood used for the bodies can be quite hard. The darker strip in mine was particularly difficult.

I chose to carve out two parts of the body. First, it’s a lot more comfortable if the bit where the guitar tucks into your ribs is curved and smoothed; second, shaving down the area where your strumming forearm comes across the guitar makes the strings easier to get to.

Once the sculpting was done, I used a router to round all the other edges.