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.

Just seeing this...I am putting this on my business card

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.

But I have proof that being able to read doesn't mean people are sensible. I had a tech...

So there's this piece of 2x4 about 18" or maybe 20" long. Exact length was not crucial. I need another one for whatever I was doing. I hand my tech the one piece and tell him I need another one the same size.

He gets out a tape measure, carefully measures the length of the one I give him, and writes down the measurement. The dimension included sixteenths.

He then uses the tape measure to make a mark on another piece of 2x4, then puts a square over the mark and draws a line. Lastly he clamps the wood and cuts it along the line.

He hands me the two pieces. I ask him why he didn't just put the right-sized one on the other one and draw a line from that.

It didn't occur to him.

I have to confess I've done things like that.

Ever heard anyone say "I cut this piece four times and it's still too short."?

You didn't specify its length, so no measurement was needed but if he had cut to a pencil line, the second one would have been a bit longer than the first. That's why some woodworkers use a knife to mark the line- it's a much more accurate way to mark the piece but it ignores the fact that the wood is unstable WRT humidity, although it does minimize stacking tolerance errors. Even if the line is only 1/64" wide and each successive piece is marked using its predecessor, the 64th piece will be an inch longer than the first.

We have a customer who does woodworking for large projects, such as world class concert halls. He must deal with trimming out the venue while the concrete is still giving up its water. The atmosphere will not reach its ultimate climate controlled humidity for weeks at least. Wooden flooring contractors will deliver the wood a few days in advance in order to allow the planks to adjust to local conditions which might be quite different from the warehouse.

The shrinkage is one reason a lot of contractors use Poplar and MDF for paint-grade trim- it doesn't shrink as much and they don't need to send the painters back to fill gaps.

Ever wonder why a lot of antique tables only have three legs?

So THAT's why MDF is so poplar!


(I'll just see myself out now....)