Week 14 - Milestone 2 - Keep on improving my cutting and joining skills until I am happy and confident with them

This week I was continuing to work on improving my joining and cutting skills. I am not making or joining any practice frames this week but I will be practising all of my joining and cutting skills that I have learned or found out through research. After my discovery last week, I was keen to see what else could be gained from trying different techniques.

This will be the last week that I will dedicate to moving my skills up a further level before I will start building my hive for real. I am doing this now because after the expense of the wood and other items I have had to buy, I don't want to make any mistakes when building the hive and find I have cut everything up incorrectly! Dad has advised that it is always best to measure twice and cut once!

There are not many pictures of me practising on wood with my cutting and joining skills as it was just after Christmas that I did these, so I did not do it for long and forgot to take many photos.

But below are some of the pictures I took practising.

In this picture (on the left) I made a frame using screws only to see how effective they were. As you can see, when the screw is fully in it keeps the wood very close together and tight and looks very strong. But you can also see that the wood has now split because of the screw.

You can see better in this picture how the screw caused the split in the wood. One way I could prevent the wood from splitting, is that I could pre-drill the wood beforehand. This would prevent the wood splitting and will allow the screw to hold the wood for longer.

I also made a practice frame using only nails instead of screws. You can see straight away that there is no split in the wood this time. You can also see that the nail also leaves a clean and smooth finish - as it is not sticking out like the screw was.

In this picture you can see the bond is pretty close together and it looks very good. Although the bond was not very strong because it was easy to separate the pieces of wood - even though they were nailed together. This shows how effective screws are and although they don't leave as good a finish as nails, they do create stronger bonds and they would surely be even stronger if I pre-drilled, and then screwed the screws in.

From comparing the nails and screws I believe that using screws would be far more beneficial to use. This is because they will provide stronger bonds for longer. Although, it will take longer to pre-drill every hole for a screw, in the long run it will result in the hive lasting for longer.

Also this week I completed milestone 2 on schedule according to the proposal and timetable which was on the 27/12/21. Milestone 2 was to use the skills I have researched and practiced on joining and cutting different types of wood and also to make a practice frame for the hive. I have practiced joining and using different cutting methods in previous weeks and then this week with nails and screws, resulting in making a practice frame. I have also practiced with other types of wood and spent time completing plenty of research on which materials will be the best to use, but I still believe that cedar wood is the best choice.

How this helped me?

This has helped me because from practising and improving my skills I am far more confident in my ability now and when I come to build my hive I am sure that I will be able to adapt and adjust accordingly from any mishaps by using the skills I have acquired already. I just need to follow my plans and measurements and be more confident when building. I should make a lot less mistakes now, as hopefully these will have been ironed out and addressed already and therefore should save me from buying any extra wood.