Yesterday evening I did my first course at Techshop it was basically a woodwork safety class certifying us to use various bits of equipment but it also had us make a nice little bench or foot stool.
There were five people in the class including me and it was taken by a lady called Beth. We got given a plank of pine and various hand tools and measures and set about measuring up ready for the cutting. Normally you’d measure then cut then measure and so on but in this case we didn’t have the time. It was a little tricky working in inches as they confuse me especially getting the fractions stuff down working out what markings on the tape to use but I got there in the end.
Once we had our pieces measured and things like a nice curve drawn for a cutout on the legs (or if you were a wuss a triangle) we went to the woodshop. We first got to use the Chopsaw a large circular saw mounted on a miter bench that was on a rail that pulled out then chopped down to cut in and forward. This thing had a laser to light it up which was pretty handy pretty soon we had all chopped up out plank into it’s various parts. My plank of wood turned out to be not the best quality and split more or less down the middle on one of the last bits but luckilly this was a part we were going to split lengthways anyway.
After we had the bits I used a scroll saw which is basically a table jig saw to cut out the curve section on the legs of my bench. Only me and one other guy did this most people went for the easier triangle option where you could use the band saw. It wasn’t that difficult to do as with most of these things it was a case of going slow and being careful and you can get a nice looking result.
With that done we moved to the stop saw which is a big bench based cutting saw. It’s called a stop saw as it uses a capacitance sensor to detect if it’s cutting human flesh and then fires a stop cartridge into the blade to prevent you losing hands or fingers or whatever. If you set it off you have to pay for the cartridge and the blade to be replaced which was about 200 dollars but then how much are having fully working non severed fingers worth. However this system is not without it’s downsides because it senses capacitance you can’t use it with anything conductive even some quite odd things like treated timber or just mirrored acrylic will set it off.
Normal wood worked fine tho so we used the thing to slice down the centre of our support pieces. In my case because mine had split it was basically more triming off the split parts to get a nice straight edge.
Once that was done we had all our bits cut and ready and went back to the main workshop to begin drilling and assembly. We were pretty late by this point partly due to having to wait a while for the stop saw due to a power conflict with another machine another class was using. We drilled all our holes, countersunk to the surface for neatness and the teacher was kind enough to let us all finish off even tho we weren’t supposed to be there that late. Well actually I could have been as I was already a member but none of the others were.
We used some square bit screws to assemble our benches mainly because square bits don’t strip like a philips would. Pretty soon I had a nice little bench which just needs a sand down and some stain and it will look quite nice.
It was fun evening using the machines to makes a something and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Now I’m certified on the chop saw and stop saw I can go back and use them whenever on my own projects. Now all I need to do is figure out what I’d like to make 
