Thread: Measure twice and .........

O'Tool's number one rule. Murphy is an optimist.
Regards

At least you figured out the blunder before doing anything irrevocable, Jim.

You would think that after 50 plus years of measuring & marking that I could get such a simple procedure right, but t'other day I made the classic mistake of marking a board 100mm too short. That's not hard to do, you may say, but it gets worse. I was actually docking several boards, all of which were approximately the same length, though I had trimmed a bit off several to square them & get rid of knots and daggy ends. They were too long to use the stop on the saw fence, so I hand to mark them all.

As I cut the 4th or 5th board, one half of my brain said to me "that's an awfull lot of waste on this one...", and just as I completed the cut, the other quarter of my brain computed that the amout of waste was longer than it had been on the previous board, which hadn't needed pre-trimming. B*gg*r!! There are occasions in life where it would be just so good if we had a "rewind" facility!

Cheers,

If you take notice travelling around NSW, a lot of railway bridges seem to be the same design. We have a couple in Tamworth. They came from a company in Scotland and have dates cast into them 1880 ish.
I can imagine some railway engineer writing to Scotland for a steel girder bridge of such and such a length to be delivered to whoop whoop. The engineer does the survey and tells the navies to put down peers in a particular point. The bridge arrives and what do you know ........it misses "by that much"(Maxwell Smart contribution). Now what do you do Scotland is half a world away and here the lads have to deal with a problem in whoop whoop
I made a tray with compartments for a railway trike I am restoring. I have built it twice so far. The measurements on my rule seem to bunch up one end and give me a false reading. Or is it the aging process?

I work mostly from photos and sketchy details stored in my head. With age-related deterioration of the grey matter, you can imagine how well that goes at times!

T'other day, I was preparing the stock for the top two drawers of my current kneehole desk build. The photo I'm working from shows a single, full width top drawer, while in my mind, I had decided on two short top drawers.

I ended up with a single, long drawer back – which, thanks to the width of the central divider, means I can still retrieve two short backs from. However, I am also short of two drawer sides which is a nuisance because I'll have to prepare more rough material to the same dimensions.

Thanks. At least I'm not alone
Cheers,
Jim

Mr WW
I am glad that there is somebody else who does things like you described. I have never entertained having a multi task machine as inevitably after a series of set ups to do a project I definitely would be one piece short and have to unset then reset the machine to duplicate the offending/missing part.
(My secret is out....I'm a cretin!)

I can remember my father in the early 1950's doing something that relates to this.
He had waited for some time to get the right pelmet timber for a quite wide window. He made it up, brought it inside and then found it was too short. My sister and I each got a pelmet for our respective windows.

Mr Chesand
You describe a problem from the 50s....I wonder how long it has been around and when was it first discovered

My most common one yes I have done it more than once, is when carefully counting the 1mm divisions on the Triton 2000 saw fence, is to find I have counted up from the full number on one side and down on the other. it does wonders to your cut.
Regards

Originally Posted by chambezio

Mr Chesand
You describe a problem from the 50s....I wonder how long it has been around and when was it first discovered

I'd reckon it has been forever. I wonder how the Greeks and Romans hid their mistakes.
I suppose the slave who made the mistake would be flogged or worse.

Measurement is good. I just cut the wrong side of the line.

Next time might be better to scribble on the waste side.

What always rubs it in for me is the example set by my late FIL. I saw him make a full-size dresser when in his eighties drawing up the plan and the cutting list on a small scrap of paper. I took him to the timber merchants where he had them running around for the quality he wanted. At the finish he had a small cardboard box with the off-cuts in - barely enough to act as kindling for a fire. A lifetime in the trade certainly left its mark.
Cheers,
Jim