Living Above The Sharks - Day 4 - Week 1 (Mark Day School)
Thursdays are a big day at Tinkering School. We have two long build sessions to push through and bring our projects to near-completion. As the structures take on three dimensions and become bigger than ourselves, the excitement becomes palpable. We start to think of this wood and these screws not just as materials for construction but as a way to tell a story. We’re figuring out a way to live above the sharks!
Click through below to see our exciting process of lifting the house onto the stilts using pulleys.
And our house, now attached and inhabitable, is taking on a personality of its own with inspirational quotes and positive messages on its walls. It’s extra encouraging when such moments happen spontaneously from our tinkerers without our prompting. I do like to think that our group agreements and playground rules around inclusion had something to do with it…
A wobbly boat base
And a test rider
The blue clamp at the far left is holding the stop block.
We decided we needed a dock to step onto after exiting our boat so several tinkerers sketched their ideas and made a cut list. The cut list included twenty 36.5” 2x3 pieces of wood. After the second or third cut on the chop saw, I suggested they use a “stop block.” A stop block is a piece of wood fixed in place at a specific distance from the blade (in this case, 36.5”) with a clamp and allows for repeated cutting of wood at an exact length without further measuring. The result? Twenty identical pieces of wood cut in a fraction of the time.
Our big project reveal will happen tomorrow at the end of the day. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working so hard to build!
Click through the gallery below for more photos from the day and be sure to check out our Flickr page for even more photos from the week.
