No Experience and Necessity

Lets make no mistake about this; I have absolutely no woodworking knowledge except for the two hours a week we would spend in Design & Tech back in secondary school – over eight years ago – and even then my fondest memories were of the plane sander, as none of my cuts would ever come out straight.

With this in mind, designing a full-size Battlestar Galactica Viper at the present time seems like a really good way to end up with something structurally unstable, with inefficient use of materials. Instead, I really need to get some wood working experience under my belt and actually build something.

The Dolls House

My grandad was always very creative – he painted pictures of landscapes and fighter aircraft and every time me and my sister visited he would create a Morph character from plastercine and position him on the living room mantle piece.

He was also very good at craft – for our birthdays he seemingly knocked togeather a range of fantastic toys – a matchbox car petrol station for me, a farmyard for my sister, a pair of matchbox car carrying boats for me, and a dolls house for my sister.

Today all of these toys still stand, including the dolls house he constructed and furnished so lovingly. This house, of his own design, grew slowly more tatty through its use and then neglect, while it sat for years, forgotten, in our garden shed.

My sister rediscovered the dolls house recently and began renovations, stripping all the interior paint work and replacing all the broken windows and door frames, but work ceased when she went away to university and the house was left with me. I attempted to finish what she had started, but as I revealed incresingly damaged portions of the body, I felt some improvements could be made.

As you can see, the original was a fairly cramped affair, with the problem areas being the hallway and garage (right lower room). The attic also lacked any kind of access and was completely sealed.

I figured I could create a similarly scaled but slightly larger arrangement, add some additional storage space, fix the hallway and include some eletronic lighting.

The new design is much longer and deeper than the original, with a hallway big enough to fit your hand in and a grage big enough for a playmobil car.

The attic has been improved by including a cut-out hinged roof which will hopefully provide storage for all the individual accessories in the house, although the structural integrity is a concern with the minimal reinforcement being used.

I hope to be able to run wired between the floor using the edges of the house and the chimney in the left hand side. The hardboard walls inside the house will also be double layered (illustrated with black arrows), with channels cut into them for the wires which connect up to switches and plug sockets.

I haven’t yet assessed the practicality of attaching plugs and switches to these 6mm double-hardwood walls, so there’s a chance when I try it out it won’t work, in which case I’ll fall back to single tickness hardwood (3mm) and move all plugs and sockets to the hollow exterior walls.

Another concern is how to attach the doors with hinges and handles, as all brads and nails are longer than the 3mm thickness of the hardboard. A combination of cut-down nails and glue may suffice, but again the integrity of the piece is questionable.

As the house grows in features, it grows in complexity, and I find myself wondering how it’ll ever piece togeather. While I can design as many simple fastening and easy to cut pieces of wood as I like, I still have to decide which pieces get nailed together in what order.

Because there are a lot of tiny pieces to this puzzle, and I haven’t even bought a splinter.

Advertisement