Seat Project Finished.

This was a week of mixed emotions in BDS102.

I spent probably 8-10 hours working in the shop on my final seat, utilizing one 5x5' sheet of plywood for my design.  I received plenty of help from Cotter and the shop techs, and I owe them a big thank you for not only helping me use the tools around the shop, but for assisting me in ideas on how to complete my seat.

I had planned to only have to spend a day or two in the shop, since all I had to do was cut about 11 pieces and put them together.  After cutting out the pieces though, it was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be to construct my project and have it be stable.  I spent just as much time, if not more, sanding the project, cutting out small pieces, measuring parts, than I did cutting wood.  I did not think these aspects would be as time consuming as they turned out to be.

Although I had to make some design changes, I am arguably more happy on how the project ended up being different than as planned.  Even though I was frustrated and had to spend more time, I am glad there were some imperfections along the way because it forced me to make some changes that I ended up being very happy with.  I thought this was a great lesson learned during this project, the fact that I had to struggle and make changes (not everything can go exactly how you plan it) to come up with something that I could've never imagined or planned out before hand.

Here are some pictures of my final chair

Continuing our Seat Project

This project has been pretty time consuming so far, but I feel like I have learned a lot about constructing 3 dimensional projects out of durable materials.  It has been a little unclear about the direction in which this project would go when we began the first exercise (making a chair out of one 4x4' piece of cardboard without cutting pieces out of it).  I thought that would be the entirety of the project, but there were in fact two more revisions to be made.

I am excited for my final wood chair, based on the designs that I have sketched out.  It will consist of 7-9 vertical panels, connected with a few curved horizontal pieces shaped like the outfield of a baseball field- to hold it all together.  I will have to do a lot of cutting, and I have no experience using table saws or any non handheld saw for that matter.  There is a lot of learning left for me to do, which has kept me optimistic about the process of this entire project.

Hopefully the deadline will be extended to next week, as I anticipate the shop to be quite crowded this week.

peace
-caleb