Blog #5

 



Today, we rebuilt the picnic table in my back yard. For the time being, we will keep the table here, though our ultimate goal is to find a park or any other type of establishment that we can donate it to.

The process of reconstructing the table was much more difficult than we thought it would be. When we took the table apart on Friday, we were sure that rebuilding it would be simple because all the holes to drill into were already in place. Instead, due to slight environmental differences between my yard and the carpentry facility such as the angling of the ground and texture of grass rather than vinyl flooring, our measurements were slightly off, which rendered the entire construction much more complicated than we expected.

To remedy this problem, we needed to drill the screws in at angles so that they would not protrude out of the table and cause problems down the line. This process involved a lot of cracked wood, but we eventually realized that using the drill’s reverse feature to clear out a new angled hole and then drilling the screw in would solve our problems.

We finished the reconstruction of the picnic table by about lunchtime, so we spent the afternoon planning for the construction of our next build, which will be a swing bench. Although we are going to have to do quite a bit of research outside the project time, we looked at plans that already exist for a swing bench online, keeping in mind that we are relative amateurs and that we have a pooled budget of $200 or so. After our planning stage, we will likely spend some time together buying all of the wood and other materials necessary for our build.

Overall, we need to make adjustments given that we finished our picnic table much faster than expected, but we are on track to learn more about carpentry and probably build two separate projects.

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