caught in a box
Are you an ‘out of the box thinker'?
Do you cross lines without even recognizing they where there?
It’s hip to be square and great to be ‘on the level’.
Especially if you’re a carpenter.
When building with dimensional lumber, it’s easy to make things fit. Everything is cut straight. Put two pieces together and use a square to line them up and a level to get everything done.
Easy.
Until you need to cut angles.
I hate cutting any angles that are not simple geometry. I always screw things up.
Trimming out a privacy screen under some stairs created a huge problem. The angles were wrong and I didn’t want to ruin four or five pieces of wood before getting something almost right.
I looked at my speed square. It had all kinds of markings on it that I never used before.
Sure I could watch a video about ‘how to cut angles’. Something about this tasks made me want to do it myself.
With some guesswork and fumbling I figured out how to get a 37 degree angle from a speed square.
I tried four times on scraps of wood before eventually moving on and using a well cut piece of scrap as a template.
That’s right! This fool just discovered prototypes and making a jig.
What angles do you struggle to cut?
What neglected tools might be helpful to learn to use?
How can you take a low stakes approach to try a new way?
How can this low stakes approach be moved to the big show?
Measure twice, cut once and repeat until your life is the right size.
Interesting stuff!
A lifetime ago, there was an oil embargo which turned the US economy inside out. I lost my shirt in my automobile leasing business when the Prime went to 18%. Wanting a simpler existence, I talked my may into working in a cabinet shop. I thought I was a pretty good woodworker going in, but I learned so much in the months I worked there. These guys were hooked on making jigs for anything they'd do more than a couple times. They'd measure like they were building machinery. There was a cause - their products were aimed at the scholastic market, and orders came in for multiples of an offering. If they shipped twenty of something, similarities needed to be exact. That brief stint in a cabinet shop quashed my sloppiness.