A Carpenter of Many Skills

Since I'm lazy and didn't write my day one blog I will do it now! So starting off Wednesday morning was interesting. At 6:30 am I received a text message from Bill Paradis with an address and a time. Bill had originally planned for us to work the first week in the shop since the rain wouldn't start, but this Wednesday it stopped. I arrived at a Cleveland Heights house prominently at 8:30 with a lunch in hand and sunscreen on. As I approach the backyard Bill and his handy man John greet me. Bill then takes me through the construction site. The construction site didn’t consist of much. Just a concrete slab and metal plates fastened into the ground. Bill then brought out the blue prints and showed me multiple views of the same drawing. This project was to be a screened in porch attached alongside the house. As Bill went over the blueprints there were dimensions scribbled all over the drawings. Everything had a measurement before it was even put together. Right after we covered the blue prints Bill didn’t hesitate for me to jump right into the action and start piecing together the porch. We started off by making the jacks that go across the top attached to the studs that are screwed into the metal plates. While we were making the jacks, John cut and fitted all the studs, the studs consists of four pieces. Two in the middle called king studs and two on the outside called jack studs. Together we put up the jacks with the studs to have an almost complete shape but the diagonals were left. Bill is very lenient in the way he measures, if the measure is just around 60 and ½ inches but just needs a little more he will add a 1/8^th of and inch to the measurement. Instead of making the jacks down below and then raising them we built the jacks across the diagonals. As we were rounding off the building completing the frame we had to call it a day because Mother Nature doesn’t like carpenters. I was surprised how much I learned the first day and how I didn’t expect a carpenter himself be a construction worker.

            The second day was a rather tedious and repetitive. Since today was supposed to be a wash Bill had me come down to E78th Street to work in the shop. I had expected to start creating my own piece of woodworking but Bill had other plans. He showed me these speakers that his shop ships out, granted they don’t exactly make the speakers but they sure do assembly everything and sell them. So the process starts off with a 3x10 CVC drainpipe cut in half. Then I take palm sanders to rough out all the exterior edges so that materials will be cohesive to the CVC. Who would have known Miss Samson’s chemistry intensive would come in handy? Then after we sand the exterior we drill eight holes because there is a plate that goes on the back of the speakers so they can be mounted. Next we take the piece over and slip in a wooden piece to help the acoustics and the metal plates for the holes. Then we glued one end up filling all the ends up with wood glue. We then tilted the piece over and just poured sand on sand on sand into the piece filling it over the top. We then brushed off the top and glued the other end cap on. Then we racked them up to dry. The reason why it was tedious and repetitive is because its not just one speaker we are making, we are making fifty of them. I didn’t finish them all but we got about a third done with the overall. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow holds.

- Eddie W.