A day made of wood - 17 Dec 2012

A lesson in woodworking at a friend's house. 

Uncle Bok is a self-taught carpenter and DIY woodworking is his hobby. His house is always a work-in-progress, there's always something going on, building, new structures eg. rooms, wall panels, flooring, ceiling panels and always some new furniture around. See, he even made his own timber flooring.

First, need to decide what they want to do before choosing the materials. One said chair, another a birdhouse, a table, before they agreed on a wooden box. 

Assortment of hardwood - we settled on "nyatoh" wood, cos it's the thinnest we could find.

Getting the right tools and machine

Head scratching to visualise the design and measurement, boys still quite blurrrrrr....

An electric saw is something you must invest in if you want to DIY @ home. And not something we could leave to our children to do without training and supervision. 

Safety briefing whilst the kids were sanding the wood pieces. Didn't know that sanding paper have different codes, the smaller the code, the rougher the sanding paper. Different sanding papers were used for different stages.

While we're busy listening, Uncle Bok's little princess opened up the sand dust bag, which was neatly attached to the electric saw.

Uncle Bok getting serious......

and the younger kids were having a Blast.

A small-sized table saw was handy to slice the wood and make the grooves.

After the 'machining' session, now the boys could be more hands on to do the rest.....

Something we could all take home today, "precision, precision, precision" - there's no short cuts, everything has to be exact and it took a lot, a lot of patience from planning to actually making the parts. The best stage was the assembling cos now you could see the fruit of your labor. No wonder people love IKEA.

Learning to use a hammer with the right strength. Uncle Bok uses an electric nail gun to drive nails into wood. It's a very innovative power tool for woodworking, runs by air pressure, and in many ways replaced hammers as tools of choice.

Inside the house - kids were building their Lego-world.

Another power tool - the sanding machine for wide surface.

And another one for the edges.

Now they've just started to warm up and couldn't wait to see the finished product.

Also making sure you clam the wood pieces straight and flat while the glue dries. Next, to wax the wooden box for the final finishing touch.

A beautiful rectangular wooden box with grooves near the top for the sliding lid, made with nyatoh wood.

A perfect fit.

My boys gave me the title for this post. They were fascinated by the video clip on 'a day made of glass' so there should be a day made of wood, of metal, of plastic, of chocolate ....


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