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14 February 2018 at 1:14 pm #471445
I had a similar experience. For some reason all my small projects would come out OK but any time I tried to create something bigger, none of the joinery would line up. It was maddening. I always felt utterly useless, and pegged the failures to my chest and my own deficient skills, a familiar pattern of thought for me.
Well, after yet another expensive failure with a wide piece of poplar (13″), I was trying to re-cut it to re-do the dovetails again, and I could not seem to get my lines to square up. I re-planed and re-jointed, every face was flat and perpendicular, but that line across the wide face was always not meeting the other side. I spent two hours fiddling before I realized that the 16″ combination square (that I had been using for more than a year and a half) was out of square.
I only ever used that square on larger projects, and only when marking across a wide face. So when I checked my edges and faces I was using the accurate smaller square, then just trusting the larger square since I’d taken care of all the other variables. And I’d been using it for so long, of course it was accurate, I wouldn’t have used it without checking it right?
It is a painful thing, to realize that all the failure of a whole year was due to a single tool and a single oversight long past. That large combination square went into the garbage with a little bit of language from me. I brought a small accurate machinist’s square to the tool store and got a verifiable large combo square that day.
The lesson I hope I can pass on is not to check your squares. You do need to do that. But also, don’t just blame yourself and your abilities blindly. Lay out your assumptions, find the reasons behind what has gone wrong, forgive yourself and take your self-worth out of the equation. And try to see who you are, how you think, and how that affects what you do. And maybe have a little fun too.
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