Saturday Carpentry Class

We continued our Carpentry Class on Saturday with everyone who wanted to continue working on the bench we are making. We only had a few hours, but we got quite a bit accomplished. Here are the students sanding the boards they had cut. Then they began marking where we needed to drill holes for the screws.
We had a lot of interest in using the power drills because most of them had never used one before. It was fun watching them get a feel for drilling the holes through very hard wood. This hardwood is literally so hard we were practically burning our way through the boards (smoke and all!)

Then we used a Fortner bit to round out an indentation where the screw heads go, so they can be counter-sunk and out of the way. The students were really fascinated by this process.
Finally, we put a driver bit in a second power drill and learned how to properly drive a screw into the wood. Again, the wood is so tough that, even with a predrilled hole, it is very difficult to push the drill hard enough. If you don't push hard, the drill just spins on top of the screw and you get nowhere. Not only that, you ruin the screw and have to get a new one. With first-time users of a power drill, we replaced many screws! I finally realized we should get a second person to push on the end of the drill also.

You can see from this picture that our bench is beginning to take shape. All of the pieces are cut and sanded now, so all we have to do now is finish assembling the bench. We plan to do that Monday afternoon after we finish our Bible classes for the day.
Oh yeah, one other thing! Here is part of the lunch Simon and I had on Saturday! The Thais had another name for it, but it seemed to be a lot like a Grouper. Very tasty!