Shop Class

[Free For All]

After reading the shop class-related experiences in another thread, I thought it might be fun to share some stories about various projects (both successful and unsuccessful), brushes with danger etc.

I'll start with Cub Scouts. I remember a project where we nailed a bunch of bottle caps to a board, spray painted it and called it a foot-scraper. And then we ate a bunch of sugar, which was typical for a Cub Scout meeting. I never did build any of those cool Pinewood Derby cars- anyone remember those?

Jr. High shop class was interesting (this was where I had the shop teacher who was missing fingers). I never created much more than a lame wooden candy dish. I sanded that sucker FOREVER and it never looked right. I remember they had an injection molder and we made plastic poker chips and golf tees by the thousands.

I never took the high school auto-mechanics class (I wish now that I had).

At that time this was where all the school "thugs" hung out. B-)

I really liked the class where we did mechanical drawing- you know, making drawings of nuts, bolts, building plans, etc. on that cool graph paper.

I'll bet we have have some shop class geniuses (and the opposite ) around here.

Show yourselves! ( <--- severed hand missing four fingers )

Edited March 9, 2005 by Free For All

[AfricaBrass]

My favorite shop class memory:

I was in the 8th grade and our shop room had a room where they kept the varnish. There were these two guys (I WASN'T one of them) that were always getting yelled at by our teacher, Mr. Wesley, to stop making pipes (for rope smoking).

One day these two got the bright idea to test out their new pipe in the varnish room. Needless to say, the can of varnish was soon on fire. It was shooting flame about 4 feet up from the can.

Thankfully, someone grabbed a notebook and put it over the can, which put out the fire.

The sad part of this is the guy (Pat) whose notebook it was was in my Algebra class with me. We had this teacher by the name of Ms. Simpson; who we all thought she was a witch (now I know there are nothing wrong with witches, but I was 13 and this was 1982). She looked like one, and her class was covered in cat posters. She was really uptight and made sure we always called her Mssssssssss Simpson, not Mrs. or Miss.

We're sitting in Algebra class the following period and Ms. Simpson asks for our homework (which you HAD to have done or else) and she's collecting it from us and walks up to Pat and gets angry that he doesn't have his homework. He proceeds to hand her his notebook which had a hole (the size of a coffee can) burned all the way through it. I piped in and told her what happened (I sat next to him) and she didn't believe us until she spoke with the shop teacher.

I felt so bad for that guy. All his work for the whole semester was now a hole.

Edited March 9, 2005 by AfricaBrass