George's First Metalwork Projects
George VondriskaThanks for moms!!!! It’s great that moms hold on to the things we made as kids, just in case….. While at my mom’s house recently I came across some metal work projects I had made in junior high and high school. It was really fun to look them over.
The lesson out of this
It was, of course, a lot of fun to see things I had made a REALLY long time ago. But what really came home to me was a lesson I learned when I was getting my teaching degree. Many of the professors at my university pounded on the idea of teaching conceptually. What does that mean? It’s not unlike the expression about giving a man a fish, or teaching a man to fish.
Sheet metal and fabric
The lantern I found is a great example of the benefit of conceptual teaching. I had a Home Economics class in junior high and made a pair of pants as part of the class. A few years later was laying out and cutting sheet metal for the lantern; a process nearly identical to making the pants (though I didn’t solder the pants).
And so I try…
As my own teaching style developed I tried hard to keep this idea in mind, and I think I still apply it to my teaching and video presentations. It’s not about THIS project. It’s about the big picture.
Does this fit into your woodworking?
So, what do you do with this? My advice is that, as you learn new things, try to keep the big picture of your woodworking in mind, more so than the finite picture of the particular project you’re working on. I think that approach will serve you well.
It's throwback Thursday, right? Like every day is throwback Thursday when you find cool stuff, cleaning out workbenches in my mom's basement, and I found this stuff, good thing moms set stuff aside and don't throw it out. So it's cool because what these are, are some of my very first metalworking projects from high school we had a crazy cool machine shop in high school. LJ Jenkins was the teacher. He was a yeller, but man, and I learn a lot So this is a wrench, three eights wrench that we made in order to use on the tool mount on an engine lathe to adjust the position of the tool and turn the handle it's threaded on the end.
And the head of this thing is drilled and tap. And then on this end, it is missing apart. We put a scribe in here. 'Cause a lot of times with metal work, you put bluing over all the metal and then you take a pen, a scribe and you scratch through the bluing. That's how you put your layout lines on metal like you do with a pencil and wood.
So there was one in there at one point and this is a lantern. There is still a battery in there. That's probably been in there for 40 years. And this was all about learning to bend sheet metal bend and break it. And soldering look at what a lousy solderer when I was in high school.
I don't know what grade I got on this, but it probably wasn't very good. A little bit of a what I'm using or was using for a tackle box. Same thing, just all about learning to break metal tabs. We were spot welding these parts together and then hindering the lid. So one of the things I got to thinking about when I found this stuff was I think once I was working toward becoming a shop teacher which is what I wanted to be when I grew up these projects are part of what really got my brain going in the direction of here's what I wanna teach.
What do I need to develop as a project to get those skills across? And this little wrench is a great example. The head started out as a long piece of metal ride. We took that to a power band saw, cut it off then drilled a hole, cut in this way to get the three eight size that we needed that had to be accurate or it's not gonna work on the nut. Then this was drilled and tapped like I mentioned, this is tapped on an engine lathe.
This was tapered on an engine lathe cut in order to get that opening in there so that the scribe would go in and out. So just a tiny little project, but what a great bunch of skills were taught to get that thing across and Ge's High School machine shop. It probably took a month to make that I dunno, cause you're learning everything as you go. So just thought I would take a second here and share some of the cool machine shop stuff I did as a high schooler. And that had a pretty significant effect on the way my brain works good, bad or indifferent in developing projects that I use for teaching today.
George, I still remember my shop classes in high school as well. I still have the lamp I made in metal shop. horrible looking I choose to weld the legs rather than braze them on. Now as a full time fabricator/welder my skill set is much higher. My wood shop teacher was a old hard nose, our first project was to make a 12" ruler to use for our projects. Sadly after my freshman year those two classes got condensed into materials tech which was a watered down version of wood shop being mandated to use a cnc router on every project.