John was proven right with his level of pessimistic perception that something will go wrong after the redemptive work we had done yesterday. True to his words, the bottom pieces was cut too short. It was a mystery as to how this had happen as we follow the drawing plan dimension. Later we were told by Brett that once we started construction, the drawing become secondary in importance. I can only conclude from this that Boat Building is both a science and an art. The art element come in after the initial tools of science like lofting and reading drawings, understand angles and all those calculation of the centres of gravity, loading, etc... and areas and wetted areas. It became an artistic piece of work once actual construction starts.
I could sense that the group is also getting paranoid about making mistakes after mistakes. Some are avoiding their discomfort zones. However this avoidance could means loss of learning opportunities. The cost of me now is only the time taken to redo and remedy the mistakes we made. Mistakes only become mistakes if they are repeated.
However it was still a "good ending" today for the group as everyone "chip in" and help to plane the bottom plywood. It was quite demanding physically as the area to be scarfed was quite extensive- 100 mm for each side. Brett also helped us in the last part to finish off the scarfing as we were afraid to make mistakes. I left at the end of the class today with good feeling about the group cohesiveness.
No comments:
Post a Comment