Woodwright’s School Day Five

Today we cleaned up and finished our seats. This involved travisher and scraper work and a lot more drawknife work. This project is such an amazing skill builder and you gain an outstanding knowledge of reading and working with wood grain. The drawknife continues to amaze me by what such a simple tool can do in so many applications. Our most difficult cut came at the end of the gutter rail where the seat curves inward before flaring out to the front. We have to use our drawknifes to cut down to the bottom of the curve while creating a convex bevel. The grain changes direction right at the bottom of the cut so prodigious skewing and slicing with highly precise cuts was of utmost importance to get a clean cut. The general consensus amongst my classmates and I was just how much we have learned in the last 5 days about grain and edge tools.

Tomorrow we begin the start assembling all the parts!