I may have gained a helper completing my Razor Billed Auk and even justified tool purchases for something other than my own “selfish” (wife's term) boat building purposes.

My 13-year-old daughter discovered the wonders of “puttering” in the shop this weekend. Her science class is studying machines / mechanical advantage etc and she had an assignment to make a machine that would lift a 1kg weight 1m using a force of less than 0.1 Newton. She designed a series of 6 in disks/pulleys which when rotated wound string around a smaller disk to gain the mechanical advantage. She asked if I could help her build her design.

We proceeded to my workshop to bring the design to life. She is deadly afraid of the machines in my shop probably from the dire warnings I gave her as a little girl about getting limbs cut off if they were touched. With some safety lectures and a little encouragement from me she proceeded to cut out some disks on the band saw and actually have some fun.

Now comes the good part. Not only did we use leftover MDF from my forms to make the disks but my router table was set up for cutting strips and the 1/4 in cove bit was perfect for making a groove in the disks to make pulley wheels. So now my $40 purchase of bead and cove router bits can be written off as an “educational" expense.

Best of all was seeing her light up as she actually built this thing that was only an idea in her head a few hours ago. The quality time spent together and her enthusiasm was more than worth any knowledge she gained about mechanical advantage.

Regards,

Jack