surf's up

Richard Bazeley, shop teacher down under in Australia sent in a photo of a 10th year woodworking project. After adding the top skin, then some sanding and finish, it will be ready to test the waves. Richard explains the project as follows:

Using photos and dimensions of existing surfboards I made drawings in a program called Rhino3d. We used this program to produce scale and full size drawings of the curves we needed. The surfboard is all curves so it was handy to be able to produce the cross sections. The student made some models and experimented with a number of building techniques including the ones you can see in the photo.

The technique we used came about through these experiments. When the student bent some timber into the shape we could see then that all we had to do was hold it in place and cover the frame. Making models was a real help for the student to understand how the timber could bend into the shapes he needed.

After that it was just a matter of scaling everything up to full size. We are learning as we go and I am fortunate that the student has the skills to do most of the construction and shaping by himself. The skills he has learned from building model planes so this is like building a model wing on a larger scale.

Here in the US, we are wrapping up another school year, and I have one more day of classes at Clear Spring School.

North Bennet Street School began its Sloyd partnership with Eliot School in Boston this March. It was actually the renewal of a partnership which first began in 1885. NBSS executive director Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez described the reasons for the program as follows:

"North Bennet Street School has long been concerned about the elimination of virtually all educational programs in the public schools dealing with hand skills and the making of objects. This has resulted in several generations of students with no access to the kind of understanding one gets when a student conceives of an object, plans its construction, and executes that plan with his or her own hands. As these students move through their high school years, we hope that they will have an awareness that working with their hands is a rewarding endeavor that can result in productive employment over an entire lifetime."

Readers can download the North Bennet Street newsletter containing the article about sloyd, Here.