My journey to Ban Bath (Day:2)

I started the first day of training by break the ice. I talked about the general conversation of our life. He is younger than me and he used to be one of the students here. Originally, He didn’t grow up in the Ban bath community but he came from Northeast Thailand. His parent contact master and send him to here for studying know-how of crafting monk bowl as a job for his future in Bangkok.

Today, I have done three tasks of training before doing my own. Firstly, I bend a tiny square at the edge of lotus petal-shaped steel into a zigzag pattern. Then, I try to assemble Lotus petal-shaped steels on the monk bowl frame.

This piece is called “Lotus petal-shaped steel” which is the one component of the monk bowl structure. Additionally, one monk bowl needs four pieces for constructing.

Four pieces of lotus petal-shaped steel will be placed on the left and right side at the front side and backside.

Using a hammer to joint a tiny square at the edge of Lotus petal-shaped steel.

Secondly, the Teacher asks me “Do you wanna try to cut steel” and give me a chance to do once. After trying to cut it, it was really hard to cut it by hand and I also surprise about their process. Then, I asked for a tip and he told me that “You have to push the razor blade near to get together and need some tempo of cutting”. While practicing for a long time, I could cut steel by hand at the end but the one, which I cut, was small pieces of wasted steel on the floor.

This picture is a steel cutter that they normally use it for cutting steel.

As for multiple times of effort, I could cut it!!!

Lastly, I did hammer training by hitting tiny squares at the edge of lotus petal-shaped steel. When cutting the edge of lotus petal-shaped steel into tiny squares, The edge of it it will always be curved. Thus, it needs to be hit by a hammer before bending into a zigzag pattern.

The teacher was showing me how to cut the edge of Lotus petal-shaped steel.

This is the base for making the edge of Lotus petal-shaped steel to be straight.

Then, place Lotus petal shaped steel and hit the egde with hammer.