This week, Fixperts Resident Maya Alvarado spends her day at British furniture manufacturer Benchmark working on two fixes for Heidi – a pupil at local special needs school The Castle: a collection of cooking utensils and a more comfortable grip for the joystick on her wheelchair.
06:20: I wake up a little earlier than usual, take a shower and have breakfast.
06:50: As I walk to work the sky is dark, but the light is slowly shifting through the clouds.
07:00: I start the day in the workshop aiming to make improvements to the tools that I have made for Heidi. I sketch my plans and some new methods of connecting the utensil heads to their handles.
07:30: The combination of different wood veneers look quite fun, but do not always sand evenly, so yesterday evening I glued up some ash veneers and clamped them in my ‘loop-spoon’ jig. They are dry so I take them out and they have bonded well. I use the band saw to remove the edges where the strips of ash have met unevenly on both sides. Next I use a small radius cutter on the router to shape this rectangular-profiled loop into a cylindrical loop. I smooth down the form with two grades of sandpaper: 100 and 120.
09:00: When I visited Heidi with the latest utensils, her tutor Martene thought that the curved loop handle could make a good cake scraper – the form also reminds me of a section of an electric whisk part. To make this I draw up a figure 8 on a piece of birch plywood – this could be formed out of veneers as with the loop handle, but to avoid the long drying time I choose to build a quick mock-up out of sheet material. Using a jigsaw (a hand-saw power tool), I remove the middle teardrop sections, and then I round the edges with the same radius cutter part on a router.
10:00: Break time – tea and toast with marmalade and funny chats with Pete and the guys!
10:20: I finish rounding the edges of the ‘figure 8’ cake mixing tool with the router and sand it is smooth to the touch, ready for Heidi to test on Tuesday during her regular cooking lesson. It will be great to find out if it is useful for scraping the sides of the bowl, if the handle is a good size, and also if it turns out to have any other uses.
11:00: I cut a block of maple into a round spoon face and use the circular sander and a mini orbital hand sander to shape the back into a spoon. I work to blend the bottom oval shape into the smaller marked pencil oval.
11:30: To make the head of a spatula I cut the rough shape out on the band saw. Its depth is quite wide at this stage to allow a surface to connect with the end of the handle. I will blend the rest of the spatula head into this point to stop it from being to large, but ensuring there is a large enough surface area for connection.
12:00: I cut an angle across the top of the spatula to make stirring in one direction easier. Next I mark out a suitable size circular to shape into the well of the spatula. It would be useful to have a depth to the utensil in order to hold ingredients when spooning out of the pan. One example of this is when Heidi stirs a toffee sauce and then scoops it out to serve on top of puddings.
12:20: Pete has made a clever part out of steel to remove material. It can be attached to a pillar drill and create a well the same shape as a spherical segment. The further down that you drill the wider the diameter of this well. We set the drill at a stopper to create a shallow dip in the spatula head.
13:00: We have a delicious lunch of lamb bolognese pasta bake.
13:30: After lunch I spend a bit of time comparing the different utensils that I could make for Heidi. I weigh up the different tasks each tool can complete and consider what would make a useful set. A spoon, spatula and scraper seem like a good set to assist Heidi with her baking each week. I will test this assumption in the next stage of testing on Tuesday.
14:00: In order to ensure that I haven’t missed any movements, I watch back over the film that I have taken of Heidi’s cooking lessons. A few of the older prototypes are too long and difficult to use. Height is something that will really determine the ease of each tool, so I hope the latest prototypes are getting closer to being the right sizes.
17:00: Having a plan for the connecting the parts tomorrow, I pack up and make my way home from Benchmark.
17:30: Yesterday I took Heidi’s new Sugru joystick handle home to dry having formed it with her to fit her hand. The Sugru is attached to a long wooden pull cord button I bought in a haberdashery to increase surface area. I got this idea from James Carrigan in his Fixperts film ‘Foridha’s Chair.’ As I arrive home I check that the handle is dry and it is. The silver is looking good blended into the bright pink – Heidi’s favourite colour. I will bring this with me on Tuesday and glue it to the metal part of her joystick.
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- interview :: made by michael
- interview :: nordvink
- interview :: james molkenthin
- interview :: richard hardy
