Oops

I wish I could tell you that all goes swimmingly all the time, but it doesn’t. One of the issues, when you do whatever anyone wants, is that you are into a process you haven’t used for a while. This means that the little details of the operation are sometimes forgotten. In this case, it was with three pieces for the back legs and two for the front legs. Two of the back leg mistakes were errant cuts and one involved a piece of wood with too much bend. The front leg problems involved “break out” on the part of the piece which goes in above the area where the leg clenches the seat.

Having a process is not a guarantee that things will go well. A man once told me that he watched a carpenter to see what he or she did when things went wrong. In this case, I just remade the pieces with my new information.

Suffice it to say, if you are not the type of person who can go over the same territory, you will not achieve good work. Sometimes, I shall even resort to practicing with a blank piece of wood to make sure that what I am attempting to do will work. This works especially well with finishing and some inlay techniques.

Another issue is to tie yourself into a timeline that does not allow for correction. Things in the shop have gone slowly over the middle of this year for a number of reasons, and, thanks to some forgiving customers and a certain amount of bloody-mindedness on my part, progress is being made. Oops need not be frightening. It can also be salutary.