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SkillsUSA Tests Students’ Cabinetmaking Abilities in a Race Against Time

Photos by Kristine Cox, Rowland Woodworking

Fifty-five competitors representing high schools and colleges from around the country had merely eight hours to create a highly customized standing cabinet. At the end of the day, only six of them departed Atlanta with a medal in the 2023 SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking competition.

The Cabinetmaking contest was one of 110 separate events held during the annual SkillsUSA National Leadership & Skills Conference, June 18-24 at the Georgia World Congress Center. In addition to Cabinetmaking, more than 6,500 students competed for gold, silver, and bronze medals in a far-flung variety of events including Carpentry, CNC Programming, Baking, and T-shirt design.

Each of the students earned a berth in the national championships by taking first place in their respective state competitions.

Winners of this year’s SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking competition included:

Postsecondary/College
Gold: Ethan Dalton, Anthis Career Center, Fort Wayne, IN
Silver: Ethan Jacobson, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT
Bronze: Luke Laing, Alexandria Technical & Community College, Alexandria, MN

Secondary/High School
Gold: Matthew Holden, Mt. Pleasant High School, Mt. Pleasant, TN
Silver: Clay Beal, West Henderson High School, Hendersonville, NC (WCA EDUcation member)
Bronze: Jerald Wetzel, Bonduel High School, Bonduel, WI

Clay Beal of West Henderson High School won a silver medal this year. He won a bronze medal in SkillsUSA 2022.

Project Overview
The contestants were tasked with building a free-standing cabinet with the materials and drawings supplied. Features of the cabinet included an 11-piece door, a top with a trapezoid plywood core with hardwood edges, a drawer, a base shelf, and tapered legs.

To create the cabinets, the students were required to read the drawings, lay out, and cut out the parts using a table saw, band saw, hand drill, hinge boring machine, and various other hand tools. Adding to the challenge, they had the pressure of working in tight quarters surrounded by their competitors while the clock was ticking down to complete their projects. They were judged on how well their assembled cabinet met the specified tolerances and aesthetics of the design.

Kent Gilchrist, technical chair of SkillsUSA and a member of the Woodwork Career Alliance Board of Directors, developed the prototype of this year’s project.

“When I came up with the concept, I started with an art nouveau style,” Gilchrist said. “I scaled it back somewhat, but still wanted to do something with curves to make the project more interesting and challenging. For example, each of the curved muntin bars on the door has a hand-cut tenon at the end to insert into the grooves of the adjoining bar.”

“So much of what we are doing in industry today is automated,” Gilchrist added. ”What’s not automated are the measuring and layout components of the project. You still have to be able to do that.”

Three Major Project Challenges
Of the 55 students who competed – 41 high school, 14 postsecondary – only five or six of them completed the project within the allotted time and none without errors. The fact that mistakes will be made is a given as this is probably the most demanding project any of the competitors has tackled, Gilchrist said. The keys to winning a medal included minimizing mistakes by thinking through the creation of the individual components and managing time effectively.

Gilchrist pointed to three of the most challenging aspects the competitors faced to replicate the prototype cabinet.

THE DOOR: The 11-piece door consisted of two sold wood stiles, two solid wood rails, three solid wood curved muntin bars – all ¾ inch — and four pieces of 1/4-inch veneered panel. “To save them time, the muntin bars had grooves cut on each side to receive the veneered panels that they cut to size and shape using a template on a bandsaw,” Gilchrist said.

“There actually were two sets of these veneer panels with the inlaid muntin bars, one for the door and one for the back of the cabinet. I wanted them to do that because we do so much panel work in the industry. It emphasized the need to accurately measure and lay out the components.”

“A lot of them did struggle with the hand-cut tenons because they were never asked to do that,” Gilchrist noted. “While contestants are always asked to bring a hand saw and chisels, most of them never really seem to use them much and it showed.”

THE TOP: The core material of the cabinet’s top had a trapezoid shape. The contestants had to create the trapezoid core and then cut solid wood edges to apply at each end to create a rectangular top.

“We had a fixture for them to cut the trapezoid core,” Gilchrist continued. “While it was designed to be cut with the face down, many cut it with the face up. As a result, there were a lot of backward tops with the trapezoid going the wrong way.”

THE SHELVING: “The half-lap joinery on the shelving puzzled some of them,” Gilchrist said. “We noted on the drawings that it was a half lap and that both sides were to be dadoed. The leg was 7/8-inch thick and the shelf was ¾-inch thick. The dado was set up for the ¾-inch thickness of the plywood but they had to remember to measure to the right point of the leg and then make a second pass in order to get the right thickness on where the shelf would saddle over the leg. Some wanted to go the easy route and just dado one side. Some couldn’t understand why they had to dado both sides. But that’s how you get a better joint.”

Upping the Ante
Gilchrist heads a committee made up of woodworking professionals and instructors from around the country. Most of them have ties to the Architectural Woodwork Institute and all are involved with their respective state’s SkillsUSA competitions leading up to the national championships.

Members of the 2023 SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking Technical Committee included:
Kent Gilchrist
, Fremont Interiors, SkillsUSA technical chair/AWI SkillsUSA Committee member
Kristine Cox, Rowland Woodworking, AWI SkillsUSA Committee chair
Joe Davis, Dale Jackson Career Center, SkillsUSA Education Committee chair
Tony Aubin, Aubin Woodworking, AWI SkillsUSA Committee member
Ryan Flanagan, Riverside Architectural Millwork, AWI SkillsUSA Committee member
John Volpe, Volpe Millwork, AWI SkillsUSA Committee member

“One of the committee’s goals has been to make the national competition more difficult to match the expectations that we have in the industry.” Gilchrist said. “As we have built up the level of challenges for the national SkillsUSA proejct, we have seen that the advisors at the state level have upped their game dramatically.

“For instance. when I took over the Indiana contest, it was a written test for cabinetmaking. They didn’t build anything. The students took a written test and the winner went to nationals. They were at a loss. Indiana typically placed middle to the lower end of the group at nationals. Since we added a skills competition in Indiana, we had one student place second last year in high school and this year an Indiana student won gold in postsecondary. It was the first time we ever had a postsecondary competitor from Indiana,” Gilchrist said.

In addition to ratcheting up the SkillsUSA project to make it more challenging, the committee also expanded the orientation day before the competition to include more presentations about the woodworking industry including an overview of career opportunities and new technologies. Woodworking instructors who attended SkillsUSA met separately to learn about the WCA skill standards and credentialing system, AWI scholarship opportunities for their students, and to engage in an open forum with their peers.

Industry Support
The following companies provided services, equipment, and products for the SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking contest.
A1 Face Veneer
American Packaging
Bell Cabinetry & Design
Blum
Boyce Highlands
DeWalt Power Tools
Flexible Materials
Grizzly Industrial
Hafele
Irwin Industrial Tools
Lamello/Colonial Saw
Richelieu
Rockler Woodworking
Rugby Architectural Building Products
Sawstop
SCM North America
Shaper Tools
Widgetco
Woodwork Career Alliance of North America

Note: WCA INDustry Sponsors are bold faced.

 

 

 

Zooming in on the Virtual 2021 SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking Championships

The technical chair of the AWI SkillsUSA Committee discusses the challenges and ultimate satisfaction of pulling off this year’s national competition remotely.

 

The annual SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference is the most anticipated event for students of high school and postsecondary career and technical education programs across the nation. Loaded with pageantry and energy, the nearly week-long event is often likened to the Olympics of CTE, with Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals being awarded to the top finishers.

In normal times, SkillsUSA occupies a space equivalent to 31 football fields. In 2019, the national championships fielded more than 6,500 contestants in 106 separate events, including one devoted to cabinetmaking.

Max Soares, the winner of the 2021 SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking competition, is flanked by his high school advisor Joseph Arruda, left, and Mike McNulty, 2019 AWI president, who served as his proctor.

But these are not normal times. Even though the coronavirus pandemic is now largely on the wane in the United States, a decision was made many months before to hold this year’s competition as a virtual event rather than at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta as had been planned during the week of June 14.

As disappointing as that decision might seem, it’s not nearly as bad as the one that had to be made last year when the fast-spreading virus caused SkillsUSA to be canceled altogether.

Cheers to the Winners
Six students, three each in the separate high school and college competitions were honored in this year’s SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking Championships.\

High school student winners included:

  • Gold: Max Soares, Greater New Bedford RVTHS, New Bedford, MA
  • Silver: Hayden Clarke, College Station High School, College Station, TX
  • Bronze: Cole Murray, Green River High School, Green River, WY

College student winners included:

  • Gold: Christopher Midgley, Indian Capital Technology Center-Sallisaw, Sallisaw, OK
  • Silver: Chris Todd, Wayne State College, Wayne, NE
  • Bronze: Ryan Faust, Saint Paul College, Saint Paul, MN

AWI Takes the Lead on Cabinetmaking Championships
The cabinetmaking competition was organized by the Architectural Woodwork Institute’s SkillsUSA Committee, chaired by Kristine Cox of Rowland Woodworking. Kent Gilchrist, treasurer of the Woodwork Career Alliance and chair of the AWI Education Foundation, serves as SkillsUSA cabinetmaking technical chair.

Gilchrist carved out some time to answer questions about this year’s most unique SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking Championships.

Rich Christianson: I assume staging this year’s SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking competition virtually wasn’t easy. What were some of the key challenges you had to overcome?

Kent Gilchrist: This was a lot more work. We’ve spent years perfecting our live competition and we had to do this one from scratch.

The first challenge was crowning the individual state champions to compete in the national competition. Most states ran virtual competitions, but some actually met in person because they didn’t have restrictions. Then there were other states that did not allow any equipment to be used. For example, in North Carolina, they could have a competition but they couldn’t use any equipment.

Christianson: Did the patchwork quilt of state rules negatively impact the number of students who competed in nationals?

Gilchrist: Yes, unfortunately, they did. Typically, we have 65 to 70 competitors. This year we only had 26 competitors. This includes five who registered from postsecondary and 21 from secondary schools. I believe we had one scratch at each level.

Christianson: So, even with far less than half the qualifying competitors, as usual, you pushed forward. What were the basic mechanics of conducting the high school and college cabinetmaking championships virtually?

Gilchrist: Each of the students completed a technical assessment, which we borrowed from the WCA. We used the WCA’s Green credential assessment consisting of 40 multiple choice questions to test their woodworking knowledge. We also had them create a cut list from a past SkillsUSA national cabinetmaking competition project. This is something they would normally do at an in-person competition.

In addition to these two components, they had to take a professional development test which is mandatory by SkillsUSA and they had to turn in a resume. Finally. we had what we called the “build project.” On their specified build day, they competed from their own classroom in front of a stationary camera. Each of the student competitors was joined by their advisor, usually their woodworking instructor, and a proctor.

This wooden tea box, the build project for the 2021 SkillsUSA cabinetmaking competition, proved more challenging than expected for many of the contestants.

Christianson: I get the advisors being present. What more can you tell me about the proctors? What was their job?

Gilchrist: One of the jobs of the proctors was to use a roving camera to take different angles of the student working on his or her project as requested by the judges.

Here’s the fun part. The first challenge we had was finding proctors. We went through our AWI network and industry connections. We reached out to as many people as we could in a short period of time because we didn’t know who the competitors were until three to four weeks before the national competition. Once we figured out who each competitor was and where they were located, we tried to establish where we could get a proctor in that location.

Our goal was to have industry-related proctors at each of our sites. But we probably ended up being able to pull only about 60 percent from the industry. They were a mix of supplier members, AWI members, and wood products manufacturing members. Some were retired members of AWI who stepped up to help.

Christianson: If the main job of the proctor was to operate the roving camera, why was it desirable to find people with industry experience?

Gilchrist: A couple of reasons. One, the proctor was someone who was also kind of keeping tabs on the honesty level of what was going on there. We needed to find someone to observe the student working who was not biased in any way. The other reason that we wanted to have proctors there from industry was so that we could introduce the industry to the schools. When SkillsUSA first announced they wanted to do this virtually, we saw it as an opportunity to build relationships between industry and education. It actually worked out well. We had some proctors who had an epiphany that we actually have schools with high-quality woodworking programs that are well-equipped.

In cases where we could not find a proctor, the school’s advisor found a trustworthy assistant to serve as a proctor.

Christianson: Which online platform was used for the competition? How did it work out?

Gilchrist: This was all done by Zoom and it overall worked out great.

On the Monday of the competition week, we held a two-hour-long orientation. We gave the competitors the scope of the contest and briefly showed them the project plans of the tea box that they were going to build. We also discussed the different aspects of the competition.

We broke the project build days into three groups, Eastern time zone, Central time zone, and Mountain and Pacific time zones. Each day we sent out a specific link to the schools that were competing that day. We probably had 30 hours of Zoom calls over four days, including the orientation and the three competition days. The competitors had six hours to build their project.

During the competition, we would communicate either through voice or through chat with the students, proctors, and advisors. For example, we would instruct them to adjust their camera or to zoom their camera in on the project or task. We could also signal the competitor to ask a question and they could ask us a question as well.

I think using Zoom for the competition turned out better than we had expected. It had its challenges, but I think the schools were used to the formats having used them. They had already been doing this for a year for remote learning during the pandemic so to have another event run through Zoom was not really that much of a transition for them.

Christianson: In normal times, when the national competition is held live in a host city like Louisville in 2019, each of the contestants uses the same equipment and materials. Obviously, that was not the case this year. I guess the upside is that students ran equipment they were used to working with but on the other hand some of them might have had newer or better equipment. Did this put some of the competitors at a disadvantage?

Gilchrist: That and the six-hour time limit were important factors that we considered when we developed the plans for this year’s build project. We knew the project had to be fairly simple, at least as far as the tools they were going to use because we did not know what kind of equipment each contestant had in their classroom. Their primary equipment included a table saw, a miter saw, and a few little hand tools, such as a block plane, a sanding block, and then either a pin nailer or some finished nails. We kept the project simple because we did not know what kind of equipment each contestant had in their classroom.

Interestingly, when we previewed the project during the orientation Zoom call, I could see this look of surprise on many of the competitors and their advisors. I believe they thought this was a very simple project. Many were probably thinking, “Wow, that’s all that there is? We’re just going to build a box.”

Much to their surprise, the project offered some interesting challenges they may not have considered. The box was a hexagon and if they cut the top or bottom wrong, the project was wrong. If they didn’t get their miters just right, then it was absolutely wrong. We gave them the dimensions and told them the parts were 30-degree angles. But we didn’t tell them they had to bisect the angles. There were some mistakes with either a wrong size part or angles cut on the wrong side of the line. There were some under-sized boxes, which is typical. Mistakes happen when a contestant is nervous during a competition. We see that at nationals all of the time.

Ryan Faust, a student at St. Paul College, won the bronze medal in the post-secondary SkillsUSA Cabinetmaking Championship.

Christianson: How were the judges able to accurately gauge if a part’s tolerance was off by just a fraction of an inch?

Gilchrist: That was another role of the proctor. At the end of the competition, the proctor’s job was to give us six photographs of different views based on guidelines and sample pictures we gave them. They would just match those pictures and give us the same image with the student’s project.

Christianson: It’s a bummer that the students didn’t get the normal SkillsUSA national championships experience. They didn’t have the opportunity to travel and represent their state or to meet their fellow competitors. Yet, considering the competition was entirely canceled last year, how do you feel about what was accomplished this year?

Gilchrist: I think it was the right choice to do it virtually and I think the students who competed were satisfied with what they were able to do. Even though it wasn’t in-person, the students were still able to take a lot away from it.

It was interesting watching the awards ceremony on Zoom. All of the medalists were encouraged to have watch parties with their families and friends. It was great to hear people cheer when each of their names was called. That was exciting. I knew all of that work was worthwhile.