Transcript.

My name is Michael Twist from Global Climate Dollar. Today I’m going to be showing you how to make a grooved sample stick.

OK, the list of things you’ll need to create a groovy stick are, a tape measure, pencil and some sandpaper, a couple of G-clamps would be handy, if you don’t have them, you can make do without them, a square is really useful.

Now to cut the groove itself you can use a circular saw or a router or you could do it with a tenon saw and a chisel, and a stick of timber at least a metre long, thick enough that you can cut the groove without weakening its integrity.

The first thing I’m going to do is put a clamp on one end, like that, tighten it up, and I am going to run a sander over it, tidy it up and the next step is to mark out the length of your groovy stick, we want it to be a metre long, so that’s a thousand millimetres, mark there.

Next we want a mark the approximately the centre of where you are going to put the groove into your stick, so put the pencil, rest your finger against the side, put that in the middle and mark the centre of your stick, all the way to the other end so you’ve got a guide to follow when you’re making your groove, look at that, any one would think I’ve done that before.

Clamp your stick in place, just like that, put a clamp on it, give it a wiggle, tighten it up, just so it holds steady while you’re cutting your groove, that’s the stick.

 As I said before, you can do this, create this groove with a tenon saw, a circular saw and a chisel or a router.  I’m going to use the router today because, well, I have one and it would be silly not to use it, it’s probably the easiest way to do it, but they can all be used to make the groove.

Look at that, the groove I am going to be cutting today is approximately a centimetre wide and approximately a centimetre and a bit deep.

Okay, now the groove is cut end to end, looks really pretty, nice, and even, and you can see the depth that we have achieved, you can see the nice notch into the timber.

The next thing we’re going to do is cut it away from the excess timber below. Ok, that’s about the thickness of the piece of timber I’m going to rip-off and keep that groove nice and strong. Mark how deep you want it to be.

Right, your pencil on there, put your finger against the side and just mark that all the way to the other end. Ok, we’re going for a metre long, a thousand millimetres is a metre. 

So, now we’re just going to grab the sandpaper, and smooth up all those edges so we don’t get any splinters off it. Just getting rid of anywhere where you might catch splinters from, I hate splinters though, just sand off all the sharp edges, and the idea is that this is the stick you’ll be using for a long time, so, try and make a nice job of it, I mean, how pretty is that? A soil sampling collector. 

Ok, now I’m going to mark every 100 millimetres, every 50 millimetres and every 10 millimetres. 10, 20, 30, 40, a bigger one at 50, again at 100 and just keep going all the way to the other end. 

And there’s the finished product. A stick with a nice even groove, end to end, 1 metre long, cut a couple of little notches across so it’ll be easier to keep track of them when it’s dirty and wet and all the other things that’ll happen on-site. Even if you can’t see the numbers, you can always use a tape measure and measure from one end up to the depth achieved and create the sample that way, so it still works.