Honing the Skills

Though we completed our entry door frames and slabs [inner structure] near the end of last semester, there is still a great deal of designing and fabricating to be done on them. Additionally, there are two more doors and a cistern enclosure door to be completed. The past few days have been spent getting our drawings, materials, and skills in line.

Because a new team came on-line just last week, it has been important to get everyone on the same page. Because I spent a great deal of time in the wood-shop last semester, I have been showing newbies Justin and Matt how to use specific tools and fabrication processes so that they will be knowledgeable as the semester progresses. We have started with the simplest [crawl space] door in order to hone our skills. In three days we have gone over how to: 1) take a rough-cut and often warped piece of wood through a jointer, planer, and table saw in order to get it perfectly square; 2) biscuit join the inner slab; 3) rout the plywood faces for a perfect edge; 4) dato cut the corners of the door frame for an optimal gluing surface; and 5) assemble the pieces for a square frame.

Aside from showing off our fresh skills, this list begins to show the importance of understanding the process of building component assembly and fabrication when solving design problems both on the site and in the office/lab during the design and drawing process. In order to draw a manufactured object, one must first know how to manufacture that object.

For example: today Matt, Justin and I went to research some Andersen hardware for our doors. Needing all entry hardware to match [between our Andersen french doors and self-fabricated doors] we are required to use a specific hardware which requires us to rout mechanical channels into the edges of our fabricated doors. It was a culminating moment for me to see us work through this multi-faceted problem together. Now that Matt and Justin have a sense of familiarity with the fabrication process, it is easy for us to have intelligent problem-solving conversations about how we can fabricate these doors to work with our complex hardware. It will only get easier as we become more adept in the fabrication process.

Being familiar with how something is built only pushes a design further because it allows us to fix an issue before it becomes one. As we acquire more knowledge about building methods and tools, we bring compounding options on how to solve a single problem. This honing of skills will only help us as we begin to work through even more complex designs of details - such as our hidden-opaque-window-assembly [even the name is complex] due next week.

For some of us graduation is just around the corner, making it easy to think about how these skills apply to an office environment. Throughout this process of designing, testing, redesigning, building, and repeating as necessary, we will be able to pass this knowledge of design and process on to our peers and co-workers, allowing us to improve overall design intent from large to small-scale, and effectively enhance collaborative energy and problem solving in an office environment.