The 2023 Woodworking Certificate is off to an exciting start! The students spent the first week of class delving into the source material for our woodworking program via an in-depth forestry tour, sawmill demonstrations, and discussion around our relationship with the forest and the lumber we source from it. We bundled up and traveled off campus to visit the woodlot of instructor Nick Zandstra, where he led us through the woods and discussed sustainable forestry methods, ethical harvesting of lumber, and gave a crash course on winter tree identification and proper chainsaw use and safety. Our first week culminated with the felling of an ash tree on campus!  Students then dragged that tree out of the woods in sections in preparation to use that material for our second week of class, creating a unique connection to this lumber.  We discussed the specific properties of ash trees and the lumber that comes from them, and learned about their strong and straight grain – a feature that makes ash ideal for our chairmaking class. 

We kicked off the second week strong as the students braved the snow and cold and used traditional hand tools to split our green ash logs into workable sizes of material. They then explored the further use of froes, hatchets, and drawknives to continue to rive (split) and shape the ash into chair legs, rungs, and back slats. We learned more about the nature of green woodworking, particularly involving the moisture content in green lumber and how wood changes shape as it loses moisture. This is particularly relevant to our chairmaking process, as the students’ knowledge of moisture content and green vs. dry lumber allowed them to create extremely strong joinery by taking advantage of the natural properties of the wood they were working with and learning to predict how their material might change and move as it loses or takes on moisture. The students also got their first taste of steam-bending wood to create graceful curves on the back legs and back slats of their chairs. 

In the course of two weeks, our students have taken an ash tree all the way from standing in our forest and turned it into eight beautiful ladderback chairs, developing a strong connection with the material along the way and gaining experience in traditional hand tool use and green woodworking. These two weeks of instruction in traditional woodworking techniques and the development of a relationship with the lumber we use will provide a strong foundation moving forward into the next 10 weeks of our program! We are beyond excited to see what these students create in the coming months.