Getting Started: A Lighthouse

I’ve decided that with the first half of my passion blog this semester I will describe the pieces I have built that have been most important to my development as a woodworker, and with the second take a look at what I want to build in the future and the skills I will need to be successful.

Woodworking has always been a part of my life in some way. Both my grandfathers were woodworkers, so I would see their shops on family visits, and pieces they built littered my house. Every year we would take a trip to the beach, staying at my grandparent’s beach house on the very northern tip of Long Beach Island in New Jersey. The house was the closest on the island to the famed red-and-white Barnegat Lighthouse, which I loved to look at and, especially, climb.

For some reason I got the idea in my head of building a model of the lighthouse, complete with a light at the top, to keep at home. I followed through with my idea, creating an internal frame of popsicle sticks I cut with wire snips and building an outer shell out of balsa wood from the hobby shop. I bought a nightlight bulb and put it in the top. I was more disappointed in the model than proud. It looked terrible, even for someone who had never really built anything before.

My failure motivated me to take up what I consider to be my first real woodworking project. I wanted to build an accurate scale model of the lighthouse, complete with as many details as possible. I took up the idea the summer before 8th grade and decided on a scale of 1:65. During our summer visit to the beach that year I made many trips to the lighthouse to measure various features and was helped by a friendly park ranger.

At the time I was very limited in tools and materials. I had a handheld drill, a jigsaw, and two sheets of plywood to work with. My strategy: stack about 40 disks of plywood, the edges cut at a very slight angle and with successively smaller diameters, to form the tapered tower. I created the little details at the top out of toothpicks and balsa wood and model clay.

At the time, I didn’t realize just how difficult it would be to cut circles with a jigsaw, especially ones that had to be cut in one direction due to the angle and varied so little in diameter.
I spent months making those cuts, and the level of difficulty is evident in the finished project, which despite a lot of sanding still shows many ridges and inconsistencies.

I designed the lighthouse to be lit, and I wanted it to reside outside the house (although I eventually decided against that), so I designed wire ducts and water drainage into the tower. I created my own little switch box to control the LED at the top and the ones meant to shine up from the base. Later, I bought a microcontroller kit made to create a realistic lighthouse flash, and even later after that designed and coded my own controller. The lighthouse was not only my first woodworking project; it was my first introduction to electronics and coding, both of which I am still very interested in today.

Despite the little failures and mistakes I see today when I look at my lighthouse, I am always a bit surprised at how well it turned out. The year I spent working on it taught me how to work with what tools I had and improvise. My dedication and the achievement of my goals gave me the confidence to learn more about woodworking and try even more challenging projects.