On July 30, 2020 at 02:37, Ernie Gilman said...
The boss who had the biggest influence on me once told of a machinist who was asked how precisely he could machine something on a lathe. The machinist asked, "What's the runout on your lathe?" He didn't get the job.
He was saying that the flaws and limitations inherent in the tools completely limited his ability to do good work. Instead, he should have said that he would work with the tool until he understood how to get around its limitations, and he'd then produce something of higher precision than the tool could make if you just turned the dials.
A couple of years ago one of my sons took an A/V job in DC as chief engineer at a banking company that regularly put on meetings around the world, with translators feeding signals from wherever they happened to live.
In an informal meeting, the outgoing chief engineer posed a question to the techs who were there. "You've got a video signal loss in this and such system. What do you test first?" One highly organized (and a bit too anal) buy said, "Well, you look for signal at the source, and then move down the chain one component at a time, to see where the signal drops out. That pins down the location to work on."
The retiring chief smiled and nodded when my son said, "I'd go to the middle of the chain and look there. If I had a signal into that node, then the problem was after that node. If there was no signal at that node, the problem was before that node. But either way, that single test eliminated half of the signal chain from being the problem."
You can, and you have to, be better than your tools. Hell, at one job I had a Sears drill press that we used for drilling, routing (that's pretty scary, though), sanding... because that's all we had. Did precision work, though.
The only reason a ruler or scale has numbers is due to the fact that more people can read. Before reading was common, people could still make things with precision because the larger increments were made by copying from a reference, then marking the halfway point and then someone decided that finer increments were needed and they understood the concept of 'tolerance', so they continued to 1/32" or whatever they could see as a discrete mark.
Woodworkers still make precise cuts with hand tools, too. Obviously, they aren't as precise as using well-tuned metalworking machinery, but it's possible to be very accurate. Unfortunately for woodworkers, the material isn't stable when the humidity changes.
