Thursday 20th January 2014

Without the use of any machines, today I continued working on my rack. I had finishing cutting out all my parts of the rack which was not a worry but now I had to combine all the parts and make the wood joints with limited resources and tools. At 2:00 in the afternoon today, I took all my pillars and started cutting them according to how Mr.Wafula showed me. This took very long as I used a saw to make the wholes where the compartments would be on. At 3:00 I went to my dads shop since he had better and sharper tools to work with. Over there, my driver was kind enough to help me with measurements and holding pieces when I would glue them. I took 3 hours to finish making my rack which included cutting holes in the pillars, and then merge all the pieces together using the joints I had made and by adding glue to strengthen the joints as said in my design specs.After I was done, I realized there was a slight problem with the alignment of the pillars as one was short making the rack to not be balanced and one of the compartments was small. This meant there was a problem with my measurements and cutting, which are one of the key things that I must take to ensure success with my rack. However, I learn't my mistake though it was not that noticeable. I couldn't do anythings as the rack had already been glued together making it difficult to remove which was a good things as it showed my rack was well-built and strong. I also placed a few items such as heavy books and my rack could hold them.

The challenges I faced today was that I had limited tools as now I had no machines to work with but had to use things such as hammer, screw drivers and saw. Using these tools was really tiring and took a lot of time. For things that take 5 minutes I would usually take 20 minutes. Secondly, was holding the rack when it was being glued and dried as I had to hold it in a still position. I overcame these challenges by asking my driver and staff to hold the rack in position for me while I added glue and also tested my patience skills to the limit with the tools I had. My strengths were that I could join all the parts together to build my rack, make use of the tools I had and good gluing and sticking skills. On the contrary, my weaknesses were that I kind of messed up a little with the alignment of the rack, due to poor measurement skills. It was also because the glue dried very fast when the position of some pillars were not kept straight. When I went home, I painted my whole rack white since my brother advised me that before I paint other colors on the rack, I should first start with paining it with white so the other colors could be painted easily and would show. It was quite easy as I used a big brush for this. After I was done painting I left it to dry for the rest of the night. The only challenge was cleaning the brush as it was hard to remove the paint and the paint on the brush got stuck on me which I then washed with a sponge and kerosene. At the end of the day, I was finally sorted out with the rack. The rack had been finally made! All that was now left to do was paint the rack, varnish it, add wheels and final touches.