A 0.2 mm mortise and tenon: the details behind gold at the WorldSkills fine woodworking contest
I recently read an article about the fine woodworking event at the 48th WorldSkills Competition, and it moved me. Ou Zu’an, a competitor from Guangzhou Light Industry Technician College, won gold and helped the Chinese team achieve a “three-peat” in this event.
Fine woodworking is a blind-task event: competitors don’t receive the official drawings until 45 minutes before the start. This edition introduced a fully three-dimensional module task for the first time, requiring them to build a staircase for a wooden house using straight tenon, dovetail and internal tenon joints. On the first day, an error in the dimensions was found on the official drawing, so every competitor’s clock was reset and they had to start again. Ou at first thought he had drawn it wrong and his composure wavered, but once he confirmed the mistake wasn’t his, he settled down.
He completed all the modules in 4 days and 22 hours. His piece was a solid-wood staircase with a handrail, built without nails or screws, using only joinery. Under the scoring rules, the gaps at the staircase joints had to stay within 0.2 mm for full marks, about the thickness of two sheets of A4 paper. During judging, many outer seams stayed within 0.2 mm, and in some places a feeler gauge couldn’t even get in.
He joined the woodworking team in 2021, starting with sawing, planing and chiseling, and spent about a year on the basics. The staircase was his weak point, because it demanded strong spatial thinking and many angle and trigonometry calculations. His coach, Huang Bolin, won gold in fine woodworking at the 47th WorldSkills Competition, and said this year’s task was kept completely confidential and was clearly harder.
What I like most is this detail: however precise a piece of work is, it is built step by step from the most basic sawing, planing and chiseling. Ou said he will keep studying woodworking and share his experience with younger students.
Source: 广州日报新花城 (Guangzhou Daily, Xinhuacheng)
Fine woodworking is a blind-task event: competitors don’t receive the official drawings until 45 minutes before the start. This edition introduced a fully three-dimensional module task for the first time, requiring them to build a staircase for a wooden house using straight tenon, dovetail and internal tenon joints. On the first day, an error in the dimensions was found on the official drawing, so every competitor’s clock was reset and they had to start again. Ou at first thought he had drawn it wrong and his composure wavered, but once he confirmed the mistake wasn’t his, he settled down.
He completed all the modules in 4 days and 22 hours. His piece was a solid-wood staircase with a handrail, built without nails or screws, using only joinery. Under the scoring rules, the gaps at the staircase joints had to stay within 0.2 mm for full marks, about the thickness of two sheets of A4 paper. During judging, many outer seams stayed within 0.2 mm, and in some places a feeler gauge couldn’t even get in.
He joined the woodworking team in 2021, starting with sawing, planing and chiseling, and spent about a year on the basics. The staircase was his weak point, because it demanded strong spatial thinking and many angle and trigonometry calculations. His coach, Huang Bolin, won gold in fine woodworking at the 47th WorldSkills Competition, and said this year’s task was kept completely confidential and was clearly harder.
What I like most is this detail: however precise a piece of work is, it is built step by step from the most basic sawing, planing and chiseling. Ou said he will keep studying woodworking and share his experience with younger students.
Source: 广州日报新花城 (Guangzhou Daily, Xinhuacheng)
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