Week Three, Week Four, FEWTEL futile

In general, I prefer blog posts which involve photographs of some sort. So, when a week mostly involves doing the same thing I was doing before, I tend not to take new photographs, and then tend not to post.

Week Three of the furniture making course was such a week. From the long distance of a week's time having passed, as I recall it mostly involved more tuning: chisels, a cabinet scraper, and my No. 7 plane which finally arrived after some gently persuasive phonecalls to Axminster. I'll take a photograph of my two bench planes next to each other so you can admire the difference in size: the No. 7 is huge, longer than my forearm and hand, and very weighty. It's mostly used for true-ing (truing? trueing?) up boards of timber...

And true-ing up is what I've been doing this week. In week three, we took a trip to BuildBase in Wantage, and bought some softwood. This will be for making our first real project items from: trestles! We are making a pair each, one entirely by hand, and one with machines to start with and then finishing off by hand. In theory, they should ultimately be all but identical... we shall see.

Once the timber had settled a bit, our first job was to roughly cut the pieces we needed. Here are my fellow students, Ian and Jane, and Jonathan (our teacher)'s head as they marked out the boards into sections. We then set about them with saws.



Lesson from this activity: I can't saw straight... yet. I am sure I will be able to, but right now, not so much.

Then it was a case of putting our pieces "in stick" to settle a bit more before we started doing anything to them.



And then... the work started! The first step is to "true up" one of the larger sides, which becomes the "face". True-ing up means, essentially, making something flat (in this case) and square (in the sense of sides being exactly square to each other). At this stage in my woodworking skills, it is far from an easy process.

Once flat, the next step is to true up the edge, to ensure that it is square to the face. Once these two sides are done, you have created two reference surfaces: everything is measured and marked from these two sides. They're also indicated with a mark like this:



Next come the width, thickness, end and length. FEWTEL. Not necessarily a straightforward acronym until, if you're me, you come back to the piece the next day and find that the previously true face and edge are no longer true. And that your cutting gauge (used to mark out the width, thickness etc.) won't hold to one measurement. FUTILE. Harrumph.

I am sure this process will get easier with practice. After all, at this stage I have pretty much no experience, I'm a complete beginner. But that didn't stop me dribbling a few tears of frustration on a Friday afternoon. I finished the week with a true face and edge on this piece of softwood, and a width of 80mm marked out... hopefully next week I will be able to finish that and true up some of the leg components!

Tomorrow I'm off to the European Woodworking Show with my co-student Jane. I will try to remember my camera, there may be interesting things to see!