Heavy metal failure.

Woodwork, metalwork, drawing and sewing.

An educational failure.

At the age of ten and a half I made perhaps my most serious life error in that somehow I managed to pass the Eleven-plus exam which would determine which form of education I would endure for the next five years or more. In doing so I lost my two closest childhood friends because they both ‘failed’ their 11+ and went to the local Secondary-Modern school and I was consigned to the ‘posh’ and formal town Grammar school – mostly I hated it.

I didn’t hate it all though , for two terms I had the best English teacher ever – he read sections of Tolkien to us in class – but then at the end of term 2 my family left the small market town, moved to the big city and everything got a lot worse in terms of ‘education’ except that there the best teacher I ever had was our woodwork teacher.

Actually though and before I start today’s post let me tell you about my first woodwork teacher at the formal grammar school.

I think he must have been ex Royal Navy because several years later I saw him, or more properly heard him, shouting at the sea cadets who had a base down by the city’s river bridge ; from memory he was in full petty officer’s rig and giving it some with his shouted ‘instructions’ ……he was a bit like that in his classroom…..minus the uniform.

In his workshop/classroom he had his teachers desk kind-of wedged across one corner of the classroom from where he could see everything that was going on. One day when I was working away at being crap at woodwork I thought to go and ask him something at his desk – he seemingly busy reading his newspaper and not noticing my approach. As I sidled up alongside him and before he saw me I noticed that he had a ‘Playboy‘ or similar soft porn magazine open inside his newspaper.

In my longer and much worse time at the city ‘grammar’ school we had a superb woodwork teacher named Wally (we always called him mister though) who had survived the second world war as a gunner in a Lancaster bomber. His class, and generally woodwork education at the time, was seen as a gentleman/artisan pursuit rather than a working trade and thus we were being taught traditional cabinet making skills. I was not only a totally crap would be cabinet maker but deadly under confident and slow too – this all being super useful fifty years later when I came to start building my wooden boat.

Today I wonder how many of those kids in the same class ever built anything useful out of wood or even if they found any of the basic skills they learnt to be of any value in their lives.

This might come as a huge surprise to a modern generation but the fact is that our education in the 1960’s and 70’s was both clear cut in an either/or kind of way – either having a formal education and thus being prepared for university – or having a secondary education and perhaps being prepared for a job in trade or industry. It was also rigidly ‘gendered’ in that the class was divided when into boys and girls – the boys being sent off to the woodwork shop and the girls all being sent next door to Mrs Dragon’s sewing and cooking class – and that was it for the next 5 years.

At some point we had to make a choice about which ‘O’ levels we would take so there was a chance to dump or take woodwork, add technical drawing or, for the girls to carry on cooking and sewing to an ‘O’ level exam. I don’t know what kind of exam the boys in the sec-mod school did in their metalwork class – it might have been a ‘CSE’ but whatever ……if you were ‘Grammar’ you did woodwork and if you were a secondary modern kid then you got metalwork.

In other streams and classes there were some odd divisions as well , thus I could do Physics and Chemistry or Biology and Chemistry but not all three.

What I really wanted had I been given the choice was woodwork, technical drawing and metalwork – oh and sewing and cooking in the domestic science class. In the others I would have taken Physics, Chemistry and Biology but dumped French and History although in later years I learnt to read history quite seriously and on a good day can say hello and order my coffee in French – my spoken French is nearly diabolically bad though and often causes near panic in the listener.

Last week my 2 years learning basic tech drawing finally paid off in that I made a drawing of the 2 parts I needed to have made, took those to the stainless steel fabricator in town and amazingly they said ‘fine’ and even seemed to understand my drawings.

I really don’t know how much of my 5 years of woodwork education has been of use to me during the time that iv’e been building the Pathfinder as it’s nothing like a shiny Mahogany box made carefully with neat dovetail joints and I haven’t even been using the same tools except perhaps for a pencil, a square and maybe one of my planes. Everything else is different – different tools, diferent materials needing different techniques and nothing on a boat is usually a square joint.

Today my inside bench doesn’t even have a fixed woodworking vice because it would just be in the way – rather I do most of my big marking and cutting on a former garden bench/table – like a large , knee height coffee table because I can kneel on the 8′ by 4′ plywood sheets as I work on them.

I like to think that I accidentally acquired a small amount of basic tool skills though because today I can still sharpen and use a plane and I can even cut a square end on a length of Douglas fir (sometimes) and/or do things without injuring myself.

Anyone with half a functioning brain will see the obvious problem with my education problem – that I went through 5 years of woodwork and during that time I didn’t quite succeed in making the one thing that I had to do as a project – that being a display cabinet for model collection. Had I also taken metalwork and say sewing (domestic science) it would most likely have been the same story – half made a metal something , half a shirt in sewing class say and I dread to think what I would have produced in the cookery side of DS.

My best mate ‘Big Al’ down in NZ can make anything in any material known to man and he can do it neatly and on time – he’s also got a huge workshop and every tool known to man : aside from once describing me as ‘not totally useless’ – in terms of practical ability that is – he did also say that once you have a basic set of tool skills with one material then you can translate that to different tools and different materials.

Here’s my ‘heavy metal’ video by the way.

Another take on that is something that Elon Musk said about learning and problem solving, actually he said two things that come to mind ; firstly that you will learn and remember anything better when it’s important and secondly a smart person knows how he solved a problem.

With each old and tired boat that iv’e owned there’s always been something that iv’e had to do that I didn’t know how to do and couldn’t afford to have someone else do it – a good example is that with the Frances 26 is that I had to fit and align it’s new engine and then re-wire the whole boat after it tried to sink on it’s mooring. I was lucky with the engine fitting in that one of the blokes at the yard talked me through the process of aligning engine and propshaft using feeler gauges – the electrics I had to learn from the bottom up with a book…..that and the internet.

Three years ago I really wanted to make some custom built bits and pieces for my outdoor kit so my partner very kindly bought me a simple sewing machine and with absolutely no idea how to use one or to work with fine slippery fabrics I set to and eventually made the one thing that I really had in mind. A lot of that was going back and forth between a couple of internet sites , one of which seemed perfectly happy to answer my stupid questions – I learnt 2 things there – first that like medicine there is no such thing as a stupid question and secondly that people who make stuff and then make video’s about making stuff are some of the nicest people out there.

This winter I have in mind a whole series of fabric projects for the boat like for instance the rain cover it will need to become a camping boat, then I’d really like to make it’s custom stowage bags and an artificial fibre (rather than down) outdoor sleep quilt.

Two years ago I started to build a quite complex boat with very little in the way of knowledge or practical skills, along the way I learnt a few things and one of the crucial things is that complex structures aren’t directly and immediately ‘made’ but instead come via a series of stages of smaller structures which in turn come from first making simple pieces. Once I learnt how to mark and cut one piece I could do it again and again – then I had to learn another small skill set which got me and the boat to a three dimensional structure and after that I had to learn a more difficult ‘simple’ skill which was how to manage long lengths of springy timber that had to bend in 2 planes and twist in another…….that was fun !.

I guess that what i’m trying to say here is that a boat or a skill doesn’t get learnt in a day or just as one process and perhaps that’s how it will be with any complex structure that I would like to build : I would for instance like to go off in a completely different direction for my next project and learn how to make an electric assisted 3 wheel recumbent bike…..how many different techniques and skill-sets that would have I don’t know.

Right now though I need to learn the simplest skills with metal – how to mark, cut, drill, smooth and polish a small piece of stainless steel…….back to the internet I feel.

Fritz the Beaver (my Frister and Rossmann sewing machine) next up for some winter work and yes, that’s actually it’s instruction book out on the work table.