Boomerang Dave's Boomerang Journal

Sunday July 15 ^th and Ian come to my place to work. First off was cutting out the remaining boomerangs from last week. This was Ian's chance to learn to work with a different tool. I set him up with the band saw and watched carefully over his shoulder. It is quite different when the blade is stationary and the piece being cut moves. You need to remember to move the wood in the correct direction. Ian had problems with this but with me there to coach, he did just fine. It was certainly easier than using the jig saw last week.

 
With all the boomerangs cut out, we switched to sanding. We moved my belt sander outside the garage to take advantage of the breeze. The helped keep us cooler, but also blew the dust away too. This became evident when I attempted to take photo and was standing downwind. I got a face full of sawdust! I started Ian out with a few boomerang blanks made from expanded PVC. These sand quickly and gave him the idea of how to shape the airfoils. I then switched him to a sample boomerang in 5mm plywood. Ian quickly found out that you had to apply more pressure to the wood if you wanted to get anything done. Ian was doing a pretty good job of sanding so I got him to work on some of the project boomerangs.


He managed to do a great job on the traditional shape boomerangs and went on to the Batrangs. These proved to be tougher to do because of the many curves. Ian did both Batrangs and traditionals.  At this point he had boomerangs with roughed out airfoils so I had him switch to a small diameter drum sander mounted in my drill press. This allowed him to get the smaller curves in the Batrang and also to smooth out or soften the edges more on the rest of the boomerangs. He was doing great. We had three ePVC boomerangs, 2 Batarangs, 2 traditionals, one 5 arm boomerang and the sample boomerang he practiced with ready to test. I'll continue with the testing in the next journal entry.

Dave

Photo: Ian sanding a Batrang