Amanda’s Tour Eiffel

Amanda is one of my summer program veteran students. During her first year at Belmont Hill she built a great looking clock. On her second year she made a beautiful shooting star wall clock. She carved out the star with a chisel and used gouges to groove out canals in its tail.

In her third year she crossed the Atlantic Ocean and built a scale model of  London's Big Ben. She used mahogany that I found for her in our  scrap-wood bin and a clock kit that I got from the local Rockler store in Cambridge. I posted a story on this project a year ago (http://americanwoodworker.com/blogs/yoav_liberman/archive/2010/07/31/belmont-school-summer-program-and-amanda-s-clock.aspx) .
This year Amanda decided to cross the English Chanel to Paris and build the Eiffel tower. Our construction plan demanded four major parts: an arched base; a four column mid structure/deck, a lower hollow stipple and, lastly, a top stipple/finial that was shaped form one piece of solid mahogany. The base was made from four parts glued together on their mitered edges, similar to the way we build some boxes or picture frames. Each columns on the mid deck were made from two parts, here again the parts were glued on their mitered edge using masking tape. Amanda did most of the work herself: Sawing, jointing, gluing, painting. I helped her to get the correct angle on the edges that were mitered and glued. She used a plane to miter the mahogany parts. Once she finished mitering I took the parts to the belt sander, I set up the fence to the correct angle (the angle was bigger then 45 because of the slanting effect) and sanded/perfected the joint.

This was a great project and I can't wait to see what Amanda will come up with during next year's summer class.