Planning and Drafting

Today we were in class again to learn about constructing a plan for our saw horse. This involved coming up with the major steps, which were Planning, Set up, Manufacturing and Assembly. Under these main steps we came up with some significant points that needed to be done to complete each major step.
Under Planning we discussed that what tools, where you were you going to work were two important steps to planned out. Hazards were also under planning and we came up with a few hazards that could result in constructing the saw horse and also how we would go about minimising or neutralising these hazards.
I struggled to concentrate through this part of the class as i had a sore, blocked ear that made it difficult to hear and hard to concentrate. I also found the planning steps hard to understand as they didn't have any strict rules or guidelines to them so in my mind all the steps were just floating around everywhere and were hard to make any sense out of. I did however learn the importance of scanning your work environment for where the fire extinguishers, emergency power stop buttons and fire blankets, before a problem arises as it only takes a second too long and someone could die or be seriously injured.

After lunch we started working on our large scale drawings of the saw horse we are planning to make. First of all we obtained long lengths of brown paper 900 wide and we ripped them from the roll at around 2m. Using masking tape we taped down all 4 sides of the paper to the wooden drafting board and then cut our paper to the size of the drafting board. After this we drew a 10mm boarder around the edge of the paper and then used large aluminium squares to make our "true" lines. From there we drew up our 100mm margin boarder on the right hand side, which contained 60mm x 100mm boxes, which had our name, project and also the scale.
Once this was complete we began drawing up our saw horses, firstly in the side elevation and secondly the plan view. I found this a good practical problem solving excersise, it really got me thinking about how i was going to obtain diagonal lengths with only limited straight lengths.