One of the best parts of being in Studio V, is the opportunity to learn more about construction techniques and woodworking skills. After participating in a safety training of all machines, students have 24 hour access to the woodshop. All Studio V students also gain even more experience during an elective course, Introduction to Craft, where we learn wood joinery techniques and perform joint studies to improve our skills.
It was a fun challenge to get to create a model for studio using only tools in the woodshop and creating all elements by hand, rather than buying square dowels and wood sticks already cut to size. For those of you unfamiliar with woodworking, I’d like to take you on a behind the scenes tour of our shop and the tools that were used to create our model:
WELCOME TO OUR SHOP …
The shop is complete with a wide array of large machines, hand-held power tools, smaller saws, chisels, sand paper, and much more. To start a project, it is important to first prepare the wood. We start with the joiner to create a perfectly flat side to a board. Next, the planer creates a parallel side and the board can be put through the machine many times in order to cut it to a desired thickness.
After another run over the joiner on a third side of the board, the final (4th) side can be trimmed on the table saw. You now have a board that is squared off on all sides and is ready to be cut down into even smaller pieces. For our model, we used the planer to trim wood down to a 7/16″ thickness, and then used the table saw to slice off tiny strips for our slat doors. The miter saw was then used to chop long strips to the correct length of our doors. We used a Dado blade to cut tiny L-shaped angles out of darker wood to represent metal.
The shop has powerful tools that make cutting wood fast and easy, but it is extremely important to always keep a sharp pencil, make accurate measurements, use the correct type of glue, and always check that your model is being put together straight.