Yesterday, I spent some time in the campus studio working on more organization. Our soldering bench has several shallow drawers and for the past year each drawer had a different item in it related to soldering. The drawer space was underutilized and honestly a mess. Plus students never put things back in the correct drawers. We used to get some nice pieces of multicolored HDPE donated by a company that makes kids playground equipment and so I used a piece of 3/4" HDPE and made a layout for all of our main silver soldering tools. I spent most of the afternoon tweaking the design while to piece was still on the router only to take the first piece off and discover that my containers of flux were not inset deep enough to close the drawer..ugh. Oh well, the torch tip recesses were over cut by the time I nailed down the outline, so I fixed the depth of cut and recut a new piece at the end of the day. I test fit this piece this morning and I am cutting a second one for our other soldering bench top drawer. Now we'll have more storage space in the rest of the drawers. I need to start my Metals studio improvements and tools website with file downloads for all of these things so people can have the files to modify and use for their studios. Someday...
Also, side-thought: these kinds of projects are super gratifying. Maybe it's because I feel like this piece should be around for a while and be used at least for as long as I am teaching here. It should also help with teaching and I'll feel better when I'm not hunting for a tool when I'm trying to demonstrate something. Over the years it feels like these kinds of jobs are the filler between personal projects. Regardless, it's good to do these things.
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