A couple of months ago, I enrolled in a woodworking course at the Eliot School, a nearby Crafts and Fine Arts school. I took the wood shop course back at good ol' DHS but this Eliot thing is some real-life Bob Villa stuff.
This course is mostly intended as an introduction to the wood shop and the machines that will do the most/least damage: the jointer will undoubtedly do the most damage while the sander is more akin to a massage. My instructor joked(!?) that the jointer is the most dangerous as it won't leave anything for the surgeon to sew on. Uh... Onward!
My project was a Shaker Box. It turns out many things in woodworking are not much more than a box (think cabinets). Talk about a valuable skill. Imagine not having to buy cabinets when you redo a kitchen! During the course of the project I used, among other things, a planar, chop saw, belt sander, chisel, table saw, band saw, dado cutter, and yes, a jointer.
The first part of our process was milling. It made me wonder, how many generations ago did my ancestors take our surname? I don't recall what the other steps were called...couldn't have been that important! Here's the final product. Click into my Shaker Box album to watch the step by step progress.
The instructors are entertaining in a dark-cabinetmaker-sense-of-humor sort of way. They love to tell stories about the time Stinky Steve lost two of his fingers in the Jointer. Or the time they were nearly impaled by a rogue piece of lumber. Or testing whether a hot dog will actually trigger the Stop Saw.