Originally Posted by
D.W.
I brought him up because he was mentioned earlier in this thread. I've met warren three times now. I told him that I had blasted him a couple of times in the past and to the extent that I was off base, I apologize for it, but it wasn't in trying to create consensus for or against him, I was trying to push him to tell us something. It didn't work - there is one route - you either gather up the criticism and use it (often for a better outcome) or you ask him a direct question and the answer will usually be short, and may give you enough to go on and may not.
Why warren doesn't want to elicit discussion that is reciprocal, I don't know. In person is a completely different experience because there is not time to suppose that he has bad motives - however, if you don't ask a specific question, he doesn't just offer anything up. When he was here the first time, I realized after about three hours that I still had no idea what he makes, but that his experience is hands on - legitimate - based on how he navigated getting a feel for my stuff. Maybe he was surprised that I was actually doing it, too - I don't know. so I asked him outright what he typically does and he showed me some pictures of recent work that he had on his phone - it's, not surprising, not work accessible to the average intermediate work, and some was complicated, and others not. It's also clear that in how much faffing he had to do to track it down on his phone, he doesn't catalogue much intending to show it to anyone.
The consensus thing has led us astray a lot of times, though - what we want to know is either interpreting things that have happened before to your piece (or you want to know or should want to know), or what happens after the passage of time and the circumstances.
That's realistic.
More common on forums is "regardless of what happens to these over 30 years, I'm right and you're wrong" or the converse. The information that comes back or the real world examples of something that didn't survive or did are pretty sparse.
This strikes me as being somewhat related to the japanning thing thing that I just went on a tirade about - I'm mad because I'm sure someone knew that the attempt that I made on the first try would work, and what the important parameters are, but it wasn't worth it to work against the consensus, which is out there - that this is either hard or expensive to do. I understand the components and the importance of resin percentage and bake temperature, and if those things are done right, it's easier than even brushing on and waiting for regular varnish to cure - if they're done wrong, then the result is soft or unbaked or whatever, and the consensus becomes that it's difficult when it isn't.
I'm just not going to post on forums much longer because the narrow and deep thing just doesn't work on forums. I had incentive to figure out the cap iron - if I wanted to work a different way, it probably never would've mattered, which means it really isn't going to matter to most people. I wish I could point out to the average person, though, that the Bills and Warrens of the world can peeve you but sooner or later, we're all better off of the quality of the information they provide is giving us better outcomes. Consensus about an idea just doesn't amount to much vs. the actual outcome - and we all tend to own that ourselves for things we do, and laying that level of usefulness after we "personally own" it from experience on others doesn't survive the snowball of consensus that tends to form bigger and faster based on personalities.
when it's just off the mark a little bit, we end up using high angle planes. when it's off the mark a lot, we hear from people that Stumpy Numbs or Rex Kruger have a video that we should see.