26TH and 25th of October

Yesterday i continued working on my tool box. Earlier in the morning i totally screwed up one of my end pieces, so i ahd to re-cut and re-rout the bottom and side edges of my end piece. Paul quickly biscuit cut, glued and clamped together two boards for my end piece and i ran it through the thicknesser to 16mm. Doing the german dovetail joints again allowed me to take more time and sue what i had learned from my previous german joints, i was able to make very nice fitting dovetail joints that were better than the original end piece i stuffed up. I also cut the bevelled edges on the top of the good end piece and chiselled out a dovetail hole to house the handle. Basically this whole day was fixing what i screwed up in the morning and little progress was made, although the new joints were far better than the older ones.
Today i continued on where i had left off by finishing the end piece and routing the handle. I routed the handle on all 4 sides of it to give a nice rounded effect. After this was complete i went on to assemble my tool box using PVA glue and around 5 pins along each length of the bottom and side joins. Daniel assisted me to clamp together my tool box and ensure that it fitted together nicely.
Next we headed into class as a whole group and by brainstorming, wrote our whole construction sequence together. We first started with manufacturing by listing the tools we used first and then writing what we used the tool for. We repeated this formula for Assembly and it worked out quite well. At first i was hesitant to work as a group because i thought it would take to long and wouldn't be thorough enough, but once we all got some momentum happening everyone was chipping in ideas and steps. It was done in about and hour and a half.
After lunch we came back and sorted out our portfolios and we wrote up a costing list, a Job Hazard Analysis and finally a draft page of a photo shop presentation on the Belt Sander. I found it very useful to have Paul print out the sheets we needed and just say "here these need to be filled out" as i knew once i had completed the work given to me, that my portfolio was in order and everything was tied up.
Over these past two weeks i have thoroughly enjoyed my time at tafe, the boys are all great blokes and i have learnt alot more on how to use hand tools such as the manual planer and chisel. I have learnt how to sharpen a chisel relatively effectively by myself and my lack of confidence with the manual planer has since disappeared and i now enjoy using it. The Japanese saw is another great tool i have been exposed to and will definitely use it again, just like the Granny's tooth planer, both ingenius and exceedingly useful hand tools.