woodworking – Montessori Muddle

Wooden Spoons (and other Cutlery)

Of the trees that were blown over in March’s storm, one was a beautiful old cedar, which, based on the ring count, was over 60 years old. The team clearing the downed wood and brush were kind enough to help secure some of the wood for the Makerspace.

One afternoon, a couple weeks ago, we lost wifi, and it just so happened that I’d recently found a set of small carving chisels on sale, so I suggested to a couple of the bereft students wondering around the lab that maybe they’d like to try doing something purely by hand–like carving spoons. To my utter amazement they were all in. And it snowballed from there. Right now I think 75% of my students are making some type of spoon or wooden cutlery.

It helps that the cedar wood has the characteristic gorgeous red and white banding.

Most of the spoons and spatulas thus far have been hand carved. Seeing the students’ sustained interest in woodworking, I decided to pick up a nice set of carving tools that included a hook for excavating the bowls of spoons.

I have to thank Mr. Seddon for his advice on tools and working with wood that has not been fully dried, aka green woodworking. I had not even heard of green woodworking before, but it has a long history, and a little research directed me on to things like the fully manual pole lathe (I’ve been wanting a lathe in the Makerspace for a while, so I may try to build one this summer).

Woodworking with green wood and hand tools requires close attention to the shape and structure of the wood. Chiseling with the grain is much easier than working against it. Knots can provide elegant features in the handle or bowl of a spoon, but are hard, and much more challenging to carve. Thus certain artistic choices did lead to discussions about woodcarving and metaphors for life.

While most of the work has been done by hand, it would not have been the Makerspace if we hadn’t experimented with some of the computer-controlled machines. One student used the CNC to cut spoon blanks of their own digital design. They were able to just do the outlines of the blanks, since we’re still trying to figure out how to carve objects with three-dimensional relief on our machine. Coach Lancaster suggested we use the laser to etch a tornado on all the pieces as a hat-tip to their provenance, so I’m trying to get a student to make us a simple design.

We do have other plans for the rest of the wood that we salvaged. For one thing, I’ve been cutting slabs using a chainsaw. It still has a lot of moisture, and will take some time to dry (a few years it we leave it to air dry), but that will be necessary for some of our bigger, future projects. However, it has been nice to be able to start putting the unfortunate felling of the trees to good use.

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.