For as long as I can remember, I have been fighting an ongoing battle with my stomach. Having been hospitalized multiple times for unbearable stomach aches, I’ve had to avoid many different food groups, and often center my life around how my stomach is doing on any given day.
Why am I starting this blog post off by talking about my struggle with IBS? Because I never thought I would have to deal with something more difficult than my own stomach, but this past week I met its match: wooden dowels.
Towards the beginning of the internship, we participated in a woodworking workshop, in which we created bat houses out of planks of wood and learned about appropriate tools in the process. My woodworking team (Rachel, Christopher, and Kenton) and I decided that we didn’t want to stop at a simple bat house: we crafted the MSAAC (Multi-Species Animal Apartment Complex), which included a perch to be inclusive towards birds and squirrels seeking lodging. Rachel and I also painted the MSAAC to look like Pinocchio, and it still sits at our team table. Dare I say it’s even become a bit of an internship mascot :))
Our team decided to create our mask-hanging frame out of wooden dowels since this is a material that is lightweight and globally available. Also, given our experiences with the woodworking workshop, we decided that wooden dowels would be nice and easy to work with. Or so we thought.
In order to create the frame, we needed to create a 24” by 34” rectangle with some horizontal crossbeams so that the masks would hang vertically. (Don’t worry–I’ll attach a photo later in the post.) We chose a 0.5” thick rectangular dowel to begin, since it was strong enough to resist bending but still small and lightweight. However, when we tried to screw two of the beams together, the dowels split down the middle.
Determined, we tried everything: smaller screws (still split the dowels), super thin nails (which bent upon impact with the hammer), even creating guide holes with a screwdriver, and nothing worked. The 0.5” dowels were just as stubborn as we were.
We then reluctantly moved on to a 0.75” thick dowel, and decided to use the 0.5” dowels as the horizontal crossbeams still since we would be screwing into the tops of the dowels, which were less prone to splitting. Sadly, even the 0.75” dowels split as we screwed into them.
What if the problem wasn’t the dowel thickness, but the quality of the wood itself? Abby and I ran (well, drove) to Home Depot and picked up another set of 0.75” dowels, but these seemed much more solid than the ones we found at the OEDK. Finally, we were able to create the skeleton of the dowel frame!
Once we attached the mask-hanging screws (which was an Irritable process in itself–screwing in 60 hooks by hand is quite painful), we finally completed the frame for our final prototype. I’ll attach a picture of Curtis down below (yes, we name all of our prototypes :).
After the full 1.5 days of working to create Curtis, I learned two things: one, dowels are lightweight and accessible, but they have their drawbacks; and two, my stomach is not the most Irritable thing I’ve had to deal with. Let’s hope that these dowels were worth the trouble 🙈