@ Fenn.
My neighbour says "measure twice, cuss once." I was once on a job to finish the odd jobs around a renovated house. Carpet had been installed, so the bottoms of doors needed to be trimmed. The new guy, wanting to impress, popped out some hinge pins, quickly set the door on a pair of sawhorses, and cut off the wrong end. Luckily, it was a standard door, easy to replace.
Another pair of doors had been delivered from a custom shop. They were French doors, with ten windows in each, to go between the two best rooms. The opening was neither plumb nor square. I spent all afternoon shaving bits here and there, until they fit with even gaps, the windows lined up, and all the edge boards had the same taper. The boss didn't mind the time it took. The customers, of course, didn't notice.
When I discovered programming, I wrote for months, and even started dreaming in the language used. The precision and repeatability are nice. In wood, cut parts change dimensions with the humidity. I've never been much tempted by 3-D printing. The affordable materials are too limiting, and I actually enjoy the hand-eye coordination of manual work. Even working in composites, where the better stuff requires almost all the work to go on the tooling and preparation is less satisfying than hammering a piece of metal into shape. This week, I've been working wood, and really puzzling over how to do it. By thinking carefully, I realized that I have to glue on two parts separately instead of the usual way, to avoid slippage from some novel angles.
On my biggest project, I didn't have time to dwell on decisions, so I used a co-worker's opinion much like flipping a coin. Maybe you should warn your managers about your propensity for stalling where guessing is needed. When I look at the history of technology, I see that it looks more like evolution trying everything than intelligent design.
06 Jan 2023, 6:00 pm
