A day in the life of the Benchmark Fixperts Resident

This article was published 11 years

This week, Fixperts Resident Maya Alvarado tries her new Benchmark uniform for size, puts the finishing touches on Heidi’s utensils, continues work on her tray for Mrs Ellis and gets inspiration from some fellow Fixperts…

06:50: I wake up and get ready for work. It feels too early for breakfast, or perhaps I am just still full from the holidays!

07:25: I leave the house and make my way to Benchmark, it is so cold this week – it feels like real winter is coming.

07:45: I arrive at the workshop and begin working on the shaping for Heidi’s final utensil set. They are the designs that she has tested, so I know they fit comfortably. I take the spoons out of their clamps, having secured the head of the spoon to the handle with a tenon joint (a 90 degree angle joint plugging into the surface of another piece) This should be strong in the direction in which it will be used.

08:00: I complete a tiny fix on some slits in the handle of one of the spatulas. There is a small gap where two strips of veneer did not join tightly, so I glue in a small strip of beech veneer and sand it flush with the whole surface. It blends in very nicely with the rest of the layers.

08:10: I look over a film clip of the fitting of Heidi’s footrests. The leather supports have worked really well and they now prevent her feet from crossing over one another, helping to keep the alignment down from her hips. It was great to get these fitted before Christmas, just a couple of days before Heidi and her family went away on holiday.

08:20: I watch the FixFilm ‘Tin Opener’ by Myles Jackson, Henry Gent and Dima French. They replace the risky method of opening a tin can by prizing it open with a knife with a new device made by cutting a steel tube at an angle. This enables the action to be completed in one motion. It is a low cost solution that can be made very simply – I want to keep this in mind when creating my fixes, so that people will be able to recreate them easily and cheaply.

08:30: This week I have also been making the final tray for Mrs Ellis. It has been formed out of solid ash with rounded corners and cut-outs to fit into her walking frame. I will treat it with whitened oil and then a clear oil to prevent the ash from yellowing. Having used a router to remove material where the hinges sit, I check their alignment and use a gauge to adjust the areas that do not match up perfectly.

10:00: Teatime – I have some biscuits and two cups of tea to warm me up!

10:15: The tray has a folding position to make it easier to be lifted off the walking frame. I use 8mm steel rod to create a rest for the base tray to sit on when it has been folded up. This will double up as a handle to lift the tray off with. I use the same metal bender that I bent the fridge handle with and as before, Craig helps me to pull the vice in the opposite direction as I pull. It is not secured to the ground, so it is just his strength that makes the bend possible. I check the alignment with a spirit level when bending the other side and compare with a scale drawing and a metal square to ensure they are at 90 degree angles. I have to place them in a vice and pull one side ever so slightly to get the lines bang on.

11:30: After the angles are perfect, I cut the excess off in the metal chop saw.

11:40: I check how they line up with the tray in its folding position and it sits square. They will be screwed in from underneath to keep it really stable. On the other side there will be a handle hole cut out, so it is easy to pick up from the side with two hands.

11:50: The new Benchmark uniforms arrive and I am given some colourful t-shirts with beautiful linear graphics of tools. I particularly love the chisel outlines.

12:00: Pete and I get out the tap and die set to tap a thread (creating the ‘female’ thread part) inside a hole the centre of each end of the bent metal rest. The screw will be fitted inside this from underneath. We use oil from Ryan’s can to make the removal of material easier. I have just been given some German orange oil for tools, which smells incredible, so we use a little of that too for fun. The smell stays around the workshop for a while.

12:30: Part of the tap accidentally breaks off inside the metal rod! This is made of such strong steel that we cannot just drill it out. If it does not come out I will have to start the piece from scratch so we try a few approaches first. One method is heating the rod up until it goes red in the hope of breaking the tap part still inside. Unfortunately, this does not work, so it looks like it will need to be remade.

13:00: Lunchtime – we have macaroni cheese with big pieces of bacon and more tea.

13:30: We try to fish out the bit from inside the metal rod one more time before giving up, Pete grinds down some 1.5mm Allen keys, but these just bend inside the rod. There is not enough time to re-bend the rod with Craig today, so I will have to remake that part tomorrow.

14:00: For the rest of the afternoon I make sure the surfaces of all of the utensils are super smooth and ready to be treated with food-grade clear oil. I work up in grades of sandpaper from 100 – 240 grit. The cake scraper tools will be useful for Heidi’s baking at home and at college.

15:00: It takes a while to get all of the router marks off, but now the cake scrapers are ready to be treated. I start sanding the spoons.

16:15: The back of the heads of the spoons take quite a lot of time to shape, but they should move around the bowl or pan smoothly now. Their faces are quite deep so Heidi can use them to spoon ingredients, as well as just stirring.

17:00: The spatulas will be useful for stirring material in a frying pan. The ‘T’ shape is for Heidi to be able to exert forwards force on the tool and to reach over the hob safely. I cannot wait to give them to her; I am hoping Heidi and her mum Fiona will come around to my house for dinner one evening soon to test them out! I head home from the workshop happy to be back into the swing of things after the Christmas break.