Description of Project:
This project was actually an assignment from a school class (Agricultural Engineering). Never the less I gained experience and learned a little about wood construction. I essentially built 3 stools that I designed using CAD and documented the whole project on the Agricultural Experience Tracker (AET). The AET is a part of Future Farmers of America(FFA) and the project is labeled as a Supervised Agricultural experience(SAE). The materials I used were cedar construction wood, wood glue, stain, and varnish. The tools I used were a powered jigsaw, handsaw, rasp, measuring tape, and a pencil.
Purpose of Project:
The reason why I did this project was because it was a school assignment so there is no deep reason.
My Process:
The aspects of this project that are applicable to “my process” is the construction of the stools and the documentation of it because the design and CAD were very simple. I made each stool a different way because I kept learning better methods of construction. Something that demonstrates this idea is that the first stool took me about a week to finish, the second took me about 5 days, and the third took me 2 days to complete. Beyond ideas of optimization such as making my work area more effective and using power tools more efficiently, the significant change came when creating a reference for cutting each piece of wood. In the beginning I marked the wood with the incorrect dimensions due to inorganization. As I noticed these mistakes, I made improvements to the way I organized my parts and the way I did my reference marks. For example, I improved the way I made reference marks by dimensioning one point of a cutout shape based on a constant point on the wood part. I then marked out the dimensions of shape of the cutout based on its defined point.
Challenges:
The main challenge with this project came with the construction of the stools. As I mentioned, I had trouble not only organizing my different parts but also using reference marks on the wood in order to make accurate cut outs. And as I have also mentioned, I learned from my mistakes by making more than one stool.
