Woodworking courses @ CEPT

1 class - 80 students!! from furniture design & interior design. – Taught by one principal teacher with four assistants.

Each student gets a set of chisels including two standard and a morticing chisel. They also get a large saw, a small saw, a file for sharpening their saws, a ballpeen hammer, and, a wet stone for the chisels, a machinist’s square, and a marking gauge. All this for one low costs of 1000 rupees or just under 16 American dollars.

Tool set

Assistant showing student how to file saw teeth

                                                                                            

Their first lesson is sharpening the tools, which all come (saws & chisels) dull. I don’t necessarily know if it is a lesson more than a told to do it. Keep in mind this is 80 students in one class. It was interesting to watch them go at it and it took all my effort to let them do their thing. Needless to say, do doubt there are many overly sharp chisels down there.

                                                                            

Sharpening Chisels

Their first project is a mortice & tennon joint, which they call tongue & grove, cut from teak wood, a very hard wood full of silica that dulls tools quickly.

 

  

For those in the know, the entire shop here is approximately the size of the bench room at Iowa State and contains all the power tools and benches.  There is also plenty of counter space outside the studio on which to work.

BTW: Design Innovation & Craft Resource Center (DICRC) and my “office” is just above the wood studio and I and sitting here just now listening to them torture some poor machine while running teak through it… 

In regards to the tools at my disposal, for some reason there are plenty of belt “disck” sanders, there is a combo machine - table saw, jointer and planer all in one. Also a few other tools I might find will come in handy including a pantorouter. Go figure. There is also a metal working area, really just another part of the wood shop, that has a couple of lathes, a milling machine, a plasma cutter and a couple of different kinds of welders. There are several shop techs who seem to be quite helpful.

Pantorouter

 

Tablesaw, jointer & planer all in one!

I am looking forward to getting in there at some point soon. Today as I was walking by, the techs were setting fire to a box full of newspaper and green Neem leaves in the shop’s doorway. Apparently this is their version of a citronella candle for warding off mosquitos, which are out in mass right now! I have a mosquito coil under my desk to keep them from chewing on my ankles. It is partially effective…

Working my way into “it.”

I get lost every time I walk on campus for they have knee walls everywhere dividing this area from that area & there is no real defined path to anything. It realized it feels kinda like you are walking through the central market in the Old City. It is a beautiful campus:

Been mostly doing settling, meeting people, getting a feel for campus, ordering phones (ok just one) and paperwork. I feel bad because it seems no matter how hard I try, I cannot remember peoples names & with my head full of humidity & them have names unfamiliar to me, it really is tough. I will get it, I hope.

Right now the heat really isn’t the problem, it’s the humidity. OMG! I really need to grow gills in order to breath here. This morning I calmly walked onto campus, about 200 meters to buy a bottle of water & the back of my shirt was soaked by the time I got there.

I promise I'll get better with the organizing my posts (A little hodgepodge)

Well it is two days and counting until I am on a plane headed toward India where I will spend five months interacting with fellow design professors at CEPT University and several different traditional artisans working in all sorts of materials. I am so grateful to Cindy Gould for introducing me to this amazing place, Ahmedabad and many of the amazing artisans.

I would be a liar if I said I was nothing but excited for I will be leaving many dear friends including a woman I am quite fond of (for a little over 25 years) and a puppy dog who has entrenched himself in my heart. I will sorely miss both of them, perhaps Tammi a bit more :-) Anyhow, I hope I am too busy to count the days but not so busy that I loose focus on what's important.

More to come in a few days.