Best workbench plans - In search of the ideal kids workbench

Best workbench plans

As I prepare to commence running woodworking activities with kids in Primary Schools, I have been exploring the best type of benches to make and to use for the programs.

My existing benches, used by adults and secondary students, are fantastic. They are solid and made for serious woodworking. However they are heavy and need to be assembled. Each bench is held together by 4 bolts. I have made shorter legs sets to enable young children to be able to use them.

This pic shows the two types of benches I have been using - the 2-vice model and the 4-vice model. Shown here in the process of being set up ready for a program with secondary students.

Meanwhile, I have been researching benches specifically for kids - and the results of my research so far have been disappointing. So I was thinking... how about supermodified saw stools? The important criteria for kids benches me are: easily portable, stackable, stable, able to fit inbetween the wheel arches of my ute, solid enough to not bounce when hammering, room enough for two kids, and two small vices per bench. So after some planning, I made a couple of prototypes - two because I needed to test out the "stackability".

So here is what I came up with in the experiment, and I reckon they are little beauties! A bit like sawstools with a widened top. Note the small shelf under as well.

Of the two small benches I made, only one has the two vices fitted so far. I need to find more of them!!They are second hand 6 inch vices made for kids. Old ones, of course, sourced from markets and garage sales. Both Australian made, one by Carter and the other by Silex.

Note the little Record #0110 block plane on the bench. It was my first plane, given to me by my father. I still use it regularly in my workshop today. I recently said to my Dad: "I love this little plane, and use it all the time. Do you remember that you gave it to me when I was only nine. Its such a good tool - except it is a real pest to adjust." He laughed and said: "Thats probably why I gave it to you!"

These little planes are really good for kids to use, as well as for adults!

Hows the stackability factor? I was very pleased the way that worked out. Now that the experiment seems to have worked pretty well, I think I will have to make about 8 more of them! I will also need to make some extensions for the legs so I have some flexibility with the height. I made one of these 2 inches shorter than the other.

It must be time I started rounding up the timber to make the rest of the batch...

Not sure how I am going to resolve the vice issue. Theyre not easy to find.

Best workbench plans

Read More..

Best selling wood projects - Kids enjoying woodwork at the Mosman Park Eco Fair

Best selling wood projects

It was a great day today. The Mosman Park Eco Fair was organised by the wonderful group of people from the Mosman Park community, including bods from St Lukes Anglican Parish in Mosman Park, and they all did a fantastic job too. There was a wide array of stalls, displays, speakers, and activities. I was there doing woodwork with kids all day. It was flat out all day!

Nice work!

??

Kids love using the brace and bit! 

??

Looks like a lidded box under construction.

? This activity was just pure creative play. There were no set projects. Just benches, hammers and nails, a few other tools, and a mountain of wood. All the timber was derived from factory waste, packaging, roofing off-cuts, etc - which would normally all have been heading into the waste stream. Better to recycle and redistribute it back out in to the community in hundreds of things the kids have created and taken home!
?

The "sawing station" in use - textbook technique, too! Well done, Kiddo.

??

Kids very quickly learn to use the vices.

? During the day we went through a huge pile of timber. I have a big box of wood there for the kids to rummage through, and I keep topping it up throughout the day. The wood is predominantly soft stuff, to make it easier for the kids to hammer nails into - bits of pine, plywood, dowelling, etc.
?

Heres a palacial residence under construction.

??

Some of these kids hung around for hours, making stuff.

?

Nice aeroplane.

? Parents derived a lot of pleasure from seeing their kids enthralled and engaged in their woodworking projects.  Kids derived lots of pleasure from using the tools and creating stuff which came into their heads. The pounding of 20 hammers went on all day.

My task was to wander amongst the seven benches, give advice on tool use and problem solving, offer encouragement and praise, and keep up the supply of timber, nails, and tools. Very busy all day. All around me were kids engaged in creative play, experiencing the joy of wood. That was, after all, the whole idea...

Thanks, St Lukes and other Mossie Parkers, for turning on this great day for the wider community.
Best selling wood projects

Read More..

Best selling wood projects - Never too young or too old to enjoy woodwork

Best selling wood projects

A recent job I had was to recycle some church pews. This church has more long straight pews than they need, as the front of the church and the sanctuary area are soon to be modernised somewhat. Shorter pews will enable the front half of the church to be arranged more into curves and be able to be put back into straight rows as required for traditional weddings etc. Improved flexibility and versatility are the aim. So my task was to make three smaller pews from longer ones, as a trial run. The congregation may have many more recycled in this way if they feel it will suit their requirements.

With my Mums 80th birthday on 8th May, our home is pretty full. My parents are up from Augusta for the gathering, and my daughter-in-law with two of our grand kids from Tasmania are staying with us too. Dad and I worked on the pews together, with some help from the grand kids. So we had 3 out of 4  generations involved, aged from 80 to 52 to 4 and 2 and a half. You are never too old or too young to enjoy working with wood!

Dad here is untying the load after we have picked up the three pews.

Having unloaded them from the ute, it was time to start the surgery. We carefully cut the pews as wed marked them out, in line with the side of a chosen backrest upright. The timber we reckon is Queensland Maple, which cut like butter. Those seats are single huge wide boards. You dont get stuff like this anymore...

This pic shows the pews after weve made the cuts in them. They were now much shorter and much more maneuverable! It was time now to carefully remove the ends from the sections wed cut off, and house the freshly cut ends into the mortises in those pew ends. After a fair bit of trimming to fit and gentle hammer work, the new ends were then re-fixed using the old screw holes in the pew ends.

Young Ronnie here is helping me to drill the new screw holes into the seat and backrest. We had previously chopped out the old wooden plugs in order to remove the pew ends, which were screwed on with nice old 14 gauge wood screws. New plugs were made from a piece of redundant foot rail, to be housed into the square plug holes wed chopped.

Glue was put into the square holes ready to receive the plugs after we have fitted them.

With glue in the holes, the plugs were hammered home. The surplus would be taken off with a block plane when the glue had dried. 

One of the ends needed some old trenches filled, which we did using redundant material from a hymn book trough. With the grain oriented in the correct way, these wider pieces were fitted and glued into the trenches to fill the holes. Here Dad is using a jack plane to remove the bulk of the surplus before cleaning up with the block plane in the direction of the grain. After the plugs and infill were cleaned off with the block plane and then sanded, the challenge was to try and match the colour. The pews appeared to have been polished with shellac. With the passage of time the timber under the shellac has changed to a yellowish colour, and the newer material in the plugs would not match the old colour with just shellac over it. So we used a maple stain under the shellac to help bring the colour up to a closer match with the old.  

With the job done, the shorter pews were loaded back onto the ute and taken back to the church. They are pictured here ready to be re-loaded. Originally, each pew in the church was made to fit a particular location, and nailed to the floor in their designated position. Therefore the old pews exist in a wide variety of lengths, with the backrests divided evenly. As we have cut the new pew lengths to match the original uprights, this means that the new shorter pews are also of varying lengths. However they look good as each has one centre upright which is exactly in the centre of that length. They look pretty good.

I believe the variation in lengths of the recycled (shorter) pews will further help them to be used with greater flexibility. I look forward to hearing how the congregation feels about these shorter pews. It has certainly been an interesting job, which in this situation involved 3 out of 4 generations of Millers. Nice, eh?

It just goes to show, youre never tool old or too young to enjoy woodwork.

Best selling wood projects

Read More..

Best selling wood projects - Kids and Woodwork A Happy Combination

Best selling wood projects

When do you first remember enjoying woodwork?

For some people it is later in life, when there is a stirring within the creative spirit - to embrace a hobby that has so many sensory rewards.  The smell of freshly cut camphor laurel, the heady touch of freshly worked huon pine, the sound of shavings coming off the plane.

Timber is so thoroughly organic, that in using it we allow our senses to reach out and experience a small part of what makes up the soul of a tree.

While few of us will ever be in the same league as George Nakashima, we do - like him - allow ourselves to attempt to bring out the innate beauty of that most wonderful of materials - timber.

I would venture to say of most woodworkers, that the woodworking seed was planted within our being when we were very young.

How many of us picked up a hammer because we saw our dad do it?

Did we see our grandpa drilling a hole and longed to try it ourselves?  Use a handsaw, and simply want to cut wood like he did?

That is certainly what happened to me.  Growing up as a baby-boomer in a suburb of housing commission homes, there was no shortage of role models who were daily working with wood.  Parents and grandparents were all part of the can-do generations that were spawned by the Great Depression.
We were always making something - cubby houses, bows and arrows, boxes, toys and what we would have called furniture.  Our families were gracious and understanding enough to even allow some of this furniture inside the house.

Now, it seems, it is my turn to be the mentor for a new generation of prospective woodworkers.  Whod have thought that Generation Z-ers who are the classically networked and i-lived generation, would have a yen for something so far out of left field (for them) as woodwork.

And yet there it is.  They have discovered the joys of using something substantial, that can be handled, rotated, shaped, assembled and presented as a finished product to be proud of - the work of their hands.

These are the same hands that daily explore virtual reality, where the only thing that is real is the screen in front of their eyes.  No wonder their spirit hungers for substance.

I think that George Nakashima would be delighted -

.......................... I know that I am!

Best selling wood projects

Read More..

Best selling wood projects - Amazing creations by kids at the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta

Best selling wood projects

A wonderful annual event, the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta is a two day extravaganza in South Fremantle. This year it feature5 6 open gardens, 5 open art studios, 2 open homes, and 87 stalls.
The aim of the Fiesta is to encourage people to take on more sustainable behaviours. During the Fiesta a Living Smart Speakers Tent is set up to allow different groups and individuals involved in sustainable living to share information in a more formal way over the weekend. Topics include those generally covered in the award winning “Living Smart” course – water, power, transport, waste, healthy homes, gardening for productivity and biodiversity, simply living, and keeping yourself healthy.

Many local Hulbert Street residents showcase their homes, creativity, work and sustainable lifestyles.
There are seven practising artists living in the Hulbert Street, and most have their studios open over the weekend. Other householders take part in a Living Smart Poster Project where they share what they have done in the past twelve months to make their homes and lifestyles more sustainable and what their future plans are.

The family at number 14 Hulbert Street made their front yard available to me for the weekend, where I had been asked to run woodworking stuff primarily for kids. This is always a heap of fun. A huge array of timber scraps are available to the kids - pine off cuts from a building site (non-treated), cut up plywood packing cases, cut up pine crates and other timber waste material. The kids benches were set up each with hammers and nails on hand, and the timber scraps were piled into one of those claim-shell paddling pools.  For most of the day the place hummed and clattered with the pounding of nails as droves of kids created all sorts of amazing things. Many got to also do some sawing with both tenon saws and coping saws, and some got to do wome drilling with hand drills and a brace and bit. No power tools here.
Sometimes a kid who had just arrived on the scene would say to me: "I dont know what to make." My normal response is: "Thats OK, just start hammering nails into wood and the ideas will come." Sure enough, it works every time!

Here is a bit of a gallery of some pics from Day One at the woodworking location:

As Day One drew to a close, I was staggered how much wood we had gone through! Twice as much as I had anticipated, which I had based on previous expereince. Then again, the woodworking activity for the kids had been an immensely popular aspect of the Fiesta.

Next morning early I was gathering up more timber from my stocks. I have a huge pile of pine offcuts salvaged from a building site (non-treated pine) after the roofers had finished. I normally cut these up on my docker and table saw into smaller bits of various sizes and shapes, and cut up plywood from packing cases into smaller pieces likewise. After cleaning out the remains of my pre-cut stock, I had to throw into the ute a great heap of the offcuts which had not been made smaller, and bigger pieces of ply similarly. After all, at 6:ooam on a Sunday morning it would not be neighbour friendly to fire up my machinery!

So my day started at the Fiesta before the crowd arrived with me cutting up timber by hand on site. The trusty 10 point Diston hand saw did a lot of work, including cutting up a whole pine pallet into smaller pieces. And a lot of pine stayed in large sizes as I just ran out of time. Besides, my arm needed a rest!

It wasnt long before production started again as the kids creative juices got flowing...

So what s it all about?

In keeping with the ethos of the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta, all of the timber used by the kids came from packaging materials and building waste. Stuff which normally ends up in land fill. Even the benches the kids were working are made primarily from recycled timbers. 

These kids were engaged in wonderful creative play. Unless there was a parent in the background trying to tell the kids to have a plan and interfering in the creative process, each kid came at their masterpiece from their own angle:

• 
  
  Some had a fixed idea and tried to find pieces of wood that would fit the picture in their minds. These kids often ended up using a tenon saw or coping saw to make the pieces required.
• 
  
  Some just started joining pieces together and soon something would emerge. It might morph into something else as it grew, but in the end the beaming face declared that it was completed. These constructions often just got bigger and more complex.
• 
  
  There were also joint projects between sibblings. Interesting how the older of the two or the more physically dexterous would often do the more complex hammering operations. Sometimes two projects would end up hammered together into a whole new thing!
• 
  
  Sometimes inspiration was drawn from other projects being constructed around them. But there were always a few who would push the boundaries and venture into unchartered waters...

In transforming the ideas into reality, the kids also had to confront the limitations of the materials they were working with, the limitations of their own physical ability and skill, and the challeges of how to join and hold pieces which they are hammering together. Selecting the right nail for the job, figuring out which way to direct the nail (eg through the thin piece into the thicker piece), getting the sequence right so that you could put it all together, and how to hammer the nail without bashing the whole project apart - there is a lot going on here. Many of the kids quickly worked out how to use the bench vices to their advantage for those tricky holding tasks. A little direction here and their in how to hold the hammer, hold the saw, which way to turn the hand drill, etc, how we might support this here, and away they went.  

In the end, isnt this all about developing life skills?

Aaah, the joy of working with wood...

 
Best selling wood projects

Read More..