Perfection and woodworking

[Mr T]

IMO this question is a matter of balancing the quest for perfection with your current skill level. As your skills improve you will get closer to perfection but probbly never quite reach it. It is the striving for perfection that leads to improved skills. Improvement comes from thinking about what method for any task will give the best result, not just using the one that seems easiest or the most expedient.

Chris

 

[timber]

As long as the joints are perfect, I'm less concerned with what goes on between them.

Mike,
I can waggle my ears ???!!!???

 

[pitch pine]

I am making a dovetailed box at the moment and doing a lot of hesitating, dithering and worrying about ruining some perfectly good timber. And then I think about why I am doing this (pleasure), and Roy Underhill's approach to woodworking. Sometimes it does work the other way for me. I made a pair of bedside tables with delicate tapered legs and a while after I had finished them I showed them to a friend. By then I had forgotten all the angst and I couldn't believe I had made them!

 

[PAC1]

When I was an apprentice the oldest craftsman in the shop had many little sayings such as measure twice cut once. The one that stands out to me was 'It is the ability to overcome mistakes that makes a craftsman, not never making a mistake in the first place'. To which he added 'Here I am 64 still learning'
I also agree that 99.99% of people never notice what you regard as a glaring mistake.
None of that should detract from us striving to make as perfectly as possible but reminds us we are human not machine.

 

[Mr T]

The closer you get to perfection the further you are away.

Pete

Very profound Pete, what does it mean

Chris

 

[NazNomad]

When I was an apprentice the oldest craftsman in the shop had many little sayings such as measure twice cut once.

... then measure again and it's still too short.

 

[dynax]

There is no such thing as perfection, nothing is ever perfect, and the only way you can tell if something you made is perfect is after a few beers when you're seeing double and each one looks exactly the same as the other,

 

[tomatwark]

'It is the ability to overcome mistakes that makes a craftsman, not never making a mistake in the first place'.

This is exactly what I was told when I was an apprentice as well and it is a good mantra to live by.

It is something I say to all the apprentices I teach

Sometimes it is easier to turn a mistake into an obvious feature than to try to hide it.

As more often than not, trying to hide it makes it looks worse.

 

[worn thumbs]

I don't claim to make anything that is perfect.I am happy if people have to look really hard to find blemishes and I have worked alongside men who are only happy if they examine another's work and detect a tiny blemish.My take is that perfection may be attainable,but it takes time and lots of it.I would rather people strove for excellence and by experience gradually raise the bar from what they were previously regularly achieving.In the final analysis one has to ask does the item satisfy it's owner's wishes?If so it was at least good enough to count as successful.

 

[El Barto]

I find the more experience I gain in woodworking the less I’m concerned about perfection. It sounds a bit dramatic but like anything else I hold it to the standards I set for myself. And if I think it meets them then I’m happy to move on to the next thing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s perfect but maybe exactly as I want it, or exactly good enough.

No. I do think in the eye of the beholder perfection can be achieved.

I’m probably just rambling now.

 

[memzey]

I was hamstrung by the pursuit of perfection as well. I would (still do at times) refuse to accept minor defects that, in the grand scheme of things, were neither here nor there. This led me to be hesitant in my projects and over complicate things. Then I realised it’s ail actually much simpler than that; if the wife likes it, it’s perfect. Job done

 

[MusicMan]

Perfectionism is an insidious disease that usually ends up in preventing the sufferers from doing anything at all, essentially leaning on their perfectionism as an excuse. Nothing can be perfect at the atomic level anyway.

Excellence, on the other hand is the goal to strive for. Also "good enough" and "fit for purpose". The absolute standard will vary with the situation. If a superb craftsman is charging top prices for the work, evident mistakes in, for example, joint fitting, are not acceptable and must be redone. For a home craftsman, a workaround in a non-obvious place can be perfectly acceptable. There is learning experience in learning how not to make that mistake again, and in the workaround itself.

And yes, if my wife doesn't spot the defect, it isn't there!

 

[Beau]

Excellence, on the other hand is the goal to strive for. Also "good enough" and "fit for purpose". The absolute standard will vary with the situation. If a superb craftsman is charging top prices for the work, evident mistakes in, for example, joint fitting, are not acceptable and must be redone.

But surly that is all subjective? There is no set standard to be gauged by that I am aware of.

 

[MusicMan]

Excellence, on the other hand is the goal to strive for. Also "good enough" and "fit for purpose". The absolute standard will vary with the situation. If a superb craftsman is charging top prices for the work, evident mistakes in, for example, joint fitting, are not acceptable and must be redone.

But surly that is all subjective? There is no set standard to be gauged by that I am aware of.

No there isn't, so in a sense that is correct. But "subjective" is a loaded term, with negative connotations that imply that the view can be disregarded. I would prefer to say "judgment", which acknowledges that the experience and expertise of the judger comes into play.

 

[Beau]

Excellence, on the other hand is the goal to strive for. Also "good enough" and "fit for purpose". The absolute standard will vary with the situation. If a superb craftsman is charging top prices for the work, evident mistakes in, for example, joint fitting, are not acceptable and must be redone.

But surly that is all subjective? There is no set standard to be gauged by that I am aware of.

But "subjective" is a loaded term, with negative connotations

I dont really get that? As said somewhere else on here everything we make is imperfect it just depends how close you look at it.

 

[AndyT]

Perhaps a real world example of imperfect woodworking will help. This one has been perfectly fit for purpose for a succession of owners. It's the stairs in our house. Victorian speculative building. Plenty of handwork.

I think the stairs look really nice - pitch pine balusters and newels, a mahogany hand rail.

Look closely at those balusters though and you'll see how much they differ from each other - the elements are different lengths and some are much skinnier than the others. Nothing really lines up properly.

On several, the chippy on site cut a notch for fitting them but if he'd measured at all, he only did it once before putting his saw to use, when we all know you have to measure twice to cut once - here you can see how he had to nail a patch back in:

Further up, you can see that this handrail needed to be stretched a little to make it fit:

And there are plenty more details which are "imperfect" but bother nobody, certainly not me. Most people would never notice unless they spent hours repainting them. Maybe a better workman could have avoided these blunders, but the one on the job was good enough.

 

[MilesH]

A useful reference on this subject is "The Nature and Art of Workmanship" by David Pye

 

[MilesH]

And there are plenty more details which are "imperfect" but bother nobody, certainly not me. Most people would never notice unless they spent hours repainting them. Maybe a better workman could have avoided these blunders, but the one on the job was good enough.

It's interesting that perfection often gets associated with uniformity... The greater the unifomity in a repetitive series, the more critical the form of each element in the series becomes! There's nothing more vacuous than badly proportioned machine turnings.....

 

[Racers]

The closer you get to perfection the further you are away.

Pete

Very profound Pete, what does it mean

Chris

Perfection only exists past infinity, infinity is where parallel lines meet.

Pete

 

[Jacob]

I expect that's where Krenov now is. And unicorns.