This past week I have done a lot of work. Specifically I loved using the hand planers because I have never used one before. If you didn’t know, hand planers are meant to shave wood in order to make it smooth. I looks like this:

As you can see, when the wood is shaved, it leaves left over thin wood curls. At the end of class, we spent about 5 minutes trying to clean all of the curls up because there were so many!

In addition to working with the hand planers, I designed my box. I had to be very specific so that Ms. Giroux could know what size pieces of wood I need. This is what my design looked like:

The dimensions on my box show that may box will be a regular rectangle. Overall, I am very excited to start building my box!

Yesterday I got to work with wood and screw drivers. When I was trying to screw a screw into the wood, it was hard for me to keep the wood steady while driving the screw into the wood. This is why the vise was helpful so that it could keep the wood steady. It was sort of like an extra pair of hands. This is what it looks like:

The vise is used to hold the wood steady. You twist the handle counter-clockwise to open up the vise and then turn the handle clockwise to tighten the wood in place. The tool that I used to screw the screw into the wood was a screw driver which looked like this:

The tip of the screw driver is made so that it can fit in place with the top of  the screw, making it easier for the screw driver to screw the screw into the wood.
This image below shows how the screw driver and the screw fit together well.

Overall, yesterday I learned how to properly screw a screw into a piece of wood properly, effectively, and safely. Some questions that I had were:

• How does the screw go into the wood so easily?
• Which types of wood are the easiest to screw screws into?
• Which types of wood are the hardest to screw screws into?