Unit I: The Workshop Foundation

Come in, scholars, and mind the shavings. Before this workshop lets you build anything, it teaches you the bench.

Every craft in this school stands on work done by hand, and hands work badly without a foundation. A scholar who cannot measure cannot build. A scholar who cuts before marking wastes good material. A scholar who fears a tool, or trusts it too much, is a scholar about to have a short lesson. So we begin the way builders have always begun: with the workshop itself, its rules, its oldest tools, and the habits that will carry through every lesson in this course and a fair number of lessons in other professors' rooms.

This unit teaches six things in order. First, the covenant of the workshop: how we treat tools, materials, mistakes, and each other. Then measuring, marking, and leveling, the skills every later build spends. Then cutting and clamping, then piercing, drilling, and fastening, including the joints that hold timber together with no hardware at all. Then adhesives, heat, wax, and glass, the materials that ask for the most respect. Last, the materials library itself, where scholars learn what wood, clay, fiber, and stone are, and make their first tools with their own hands, a reed pen, a clay stylus, and a folder, the way the oldest makers did.

Nothing in this unit is busywork. These six lessons are the tickets the rest of the course is punched against, and scholars will feel them click into place the first time a shelf stands level because Lesson 2 was learned properly.

Unit Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, scholars will be able to:

1. Set up a workspace, name and handle its tools respectfully, and put everything away in its place.
2. Measure and mark accurately with ruler, calipers, and square, and check work for level and plumb with spirit level, water level, plumb line, and string line.
3. Cut, score, and clamp paper, card, and stock safely, keeping the work secured and the fingers clear of the cut.
4. Pierce and drill clean holes, drive screws and brads, and fit simple joinery: notched, lap, and pegged joints.
5. Choose an adhesive for a job, handle hot wax and heat sources within their rules, and handle glass and ceramic safely.
6. Identify the workshop's core materials and make three simple tools: a reed pen, a clay wedge stylus, and a folder.

In This Unit

The Unit I Quiz closes this unit. You will find it, with its download, at the end of Lesson 6: The Materials Library & First Tool-Making.

What Scholars Will Practice and Make

A bench set up, worked at, and put away correctly. A board measured and marked three different ways, leveled two ways, and checked for plumb. Test cuts in scrap that follow the line. A trial joint in scrap wood: notch, lap, and peg. Glue test sticks, labeled and broken after curing, so scholars learn with their own hands which glue held and which let go. A supervised pour of wax into a practice mold. And at the end of the unit, three working tools the scholar made alone: a reed pen that writes, a clay stylus that presses a clean wedge, and a folder that creases paper true.

Every drill in this unit is done on scrap and sampler stock. Repetition is the teacher here, and scrap is cheap tuition.

With hands trained and the foundation laid, the workshop turns to its first real obligations. Other scholars across the castle are keeping journals, logs, and charts that need covers, cases, and bindings. Unit II takes up paper and bound records, and starts paying those debts.