Week 13 - Continuing to make a practice frame from the hive

This week I have decided to keep working on and developing                                                    

a practice frame for my hive; until I am confident in my skills that I will be able to make it for real without any mistakes. When I say 'practice frame' I actually mean a super frame from the hive.

I am choosing to practice this because I believe it will be great practice to get used to the different ways to join and cut wood and will also allow me to learn and see where to improve the hive in many places. I believe that this section is relatively simple to make, (compared to the rest of the parts of the hive) this will allow me to have many attempts at making and practising different cutting and joining methods and ultimately help me decide which will be best for the hive.

https://www.hives.online/National_bee_hive_super_box/p3886638_15759416.aspx

The pictures below, show examples of my different attempts at making this super frame.

In this photograph to the left, I have attempted to make a rough copy of the super frame that is displayed in the sketch above. To make this rough copy of the super frame; I got 4 pieces of equally sized spare wood I found. These pieces of wood are all about 1 inch thick and have a similar width to what the actual super box will be - although the pieces of wood are slightly longer. I just nailed the pieces together, on this occasion, to get a rough idea of how I would make the super frame for my hive

The photograph to the right is of me building this practice frame. I found it hard to nail the first two pieces of wood together, but after that I found it much easier to nail later on. 

While nailing these pieces of wood together, I also discovered a way to hammer the nails in, without splitting the wood, and without pre-drilling the wood. I found if I flattened the tip of the nail a little bit, the wood was much less likely to split, when I hammered it in. This discovery made it much easier when hammering in nails as I didn't have to worry about splitting the wood and it will also save me time when building the hive, as I potentially won't have to pre-drill as often.

How this helped me?

This exercise helped me greatly to get a 'feel' of how to make the frame and has greatly improve my skills already! So when I start construction for real, I will already have some experience and I will know how to make the frame properly and know how to make it last much longer as well. Also because I was practising how to make a frame for the hive, I also know where to improve the hive frame to make it stronger so it will last much longer and also how to assemble it much quicker. This was all possible because I started to make these practice frames and gained some valuable insights prior to the build, demonstrating that sometimes reading about how things should be done is not necessarily better than learning first hand, through experience. Both knowledge and practical work combined helps clearly identify potential problems and solutions and so help me acquire more 'tricks of the trade'.