Do as I say, not as I do...

[Scott Brader]

I made one of my most boneheaded moves ever this weekend. (The key being one of my most boneheaded moves - which implies that I have made more and some of them much worse.) I am building a new vanity for our master bath. It's a simple shaker style. My wife found one she really liked at one of the dozens of stores we wandered through. They wanted $548, but I figured I could build it for less than half that. I have the whole carcase built and was cutting and fitting the rails and stiles for the drawer and doors. I kept reminding myself to measure to the top, not to the stop (the door stop).


I measured a couple of times. I even cut a test piece to verify my measurements before cutting all of the rails and stiles. I dry fit the drawer and doors together to check out the gap sizes, etc. The drawer is perfect. The door is perfect, too, except it is cut to the bottom of the door stop, not the bottom of the top trim.


NOOOOOOOO!!!!


Fortunately, it is going to be a painted piece so it's just made of poplar and not an expensive hardwood. I (of course) was just short of extra material to re-cut four stiles so I had to make the trip to the hardwood supplier Saturday to pick up some more poplar. I used the opportunity to buy some wood for the medicine cabinet that she decided she wants me to build, too, as long as I was there. The mistake only cost me a few bucks, some time and my pride.


I told my wife that I am going to completely finish one of the short doors and hang it in my shop as a reminder to put a piece of painter's tape, or something, on future work as a visible reminder instead of only relying on my aging brain!

[rudy de haas]

I feel your pain.

I made four shelves last week for each of the left and right sides of the space they're going in. By the nature of the thing the sides are cut differently for the left and right sides - but I managed to produce five of one, and three of the other.

[glenn bradley]

Pieces of tape, witness marks, triangle system, all are good reminders to help us stay on track and I use them all . . . and still manage the classic bonehead move now and again.

[Robert Engel]

If you're >60 this is fairly SOP.

But if you're <60 its just practice for what's to come. LOL

[Scott Brader]

Pieces of tape, witness marks, triangle system, all are good reminders to help us stay on track and I use them all . . . and still manage the classic bonehead move now and again. I usually use some sort of visible marking system, too, but I figured that this one was so easy that there was no way I'd mess it up. I guess I proved myself wrong once again!

[Jim Becker]

Yea..."measure twice, cut once..." is a great thing, as long as you're measuring the correct thing. LOL "Stuff happens". Fortunately, one of our woodworking skills is to be able to adapt to, um...changing conditions... :D There are none among us who have not done similar to your experience...multiple times. ;)

[Keith Hankins]

Been there on Doors. One thing though I gon't understand, if its going to be painted why not just add a strip to bottom and top and be done. Why rip all new?

[John TenEyck]

Thanks for your posting. I feel much better now after reading I'm not the only one who works carefully, measures twice, and still manages to do it wrong - frequently. I recently built some drawers. They were perfect until I went to install them and they wouldn't go into the faceframe opening. Seems I had sized them based off the drawer front height instead of the faceframe opening. Both numbers were on my drawing and like a fool I read the wrong number. A much better approach would have been to physically measure the faceframe opening, but it wasn't in my shop any longer. That's my excuse. So now I have 4 drawers looking for a home.

John

[Scott Brader]

Been there on Doors. One thing though I gon't understand, if its going to be painted why not just add a strip to bottom and top and be done. Why rip all new?

I originally thought that I might try that, but adding a strip to the doors would make them out of proportion to the rest of the rails and stiles. Adding a strip to the top or bottom of the door opening would alter the overall look of the piece and not match the look around the drawer. I decided that it would be better to just do it right and redo the doors entirely. Otherwise, I would see that error every time I went into the bathroom and it would drive me nuts that I didn't just fix it the right way.

[Dan Schocke]

I, too, feel your pain. I've been replacing my stairs with oak risers and treads that I milled from rough lumber.... I made a jig to help me "scribe" the treads to the skirt board on both sides, cut to the right width, etc. I then adjusted the angle on my miter gauge as close as possible to the prevailing angle of the scribe line, cut one side, adjust angle again, cut the other side. The system worked perfectly for the first 14 treads. On #15, my mind decided to take a holiday and I forgot to adjust the angle for the second cut. The tread was the perfect width at the back of the stair and then a little more than 1/8" short in the front. It really hurts when you have to wait a few days to replace your mistake while you mill more lumber, wait for glue to dry, etc.

--Dan

[Dick Brown]

I have heard there are those who add a mistake on purpose to their work as only God can do perfect work. I must be a better craftsman than that as I add them automatically!

[Scott Brader]

I have heard there are those who add a mistake on purpose to their work as only God can do perfect work. I must be a better craftsman than that as I add them automatically! Ha ha!!! There's never any danger of me having to purposely add mistakes to my work, either!

[Chris Hachet]

I have made plenty of bonehead moves, this is actually quite minor. As long as I have ten fingers....

[Malcolm McLeod]

Most of my efforts involve a similar episode I call massive epicyclic cerebral flatulence. ...Hey, it makes me feel better - - kind of like I'm in a protected class?

[Sam Murdoch]

You can't make mistakes if you don't do anything. Some comfort in that thought right :D.

The mistake that bites me the most often is that I will make a pencil line (cut line - my little one sided arrow) then I will change my mind about dimensions or grain pattern - some such excuse - and add another cut line WITHOUT erasing the 1st one. You know the rest of the story.

I tell myself AND anyone who works with me - If you add another pencil mark - ERASE THE OLD ONE. Some days I just live on the edge and the wrong edge gets cut off :eek:.

[Ray Selinger]

I was lucky, I cut the rails exactly two stile widths too long. I found it before gluing. And had the set-up on the shaper.

[andrew whicker]

I recently measured 9 3/4" and my brain read 9 1/4".

Wondered why my mitered box wasn't quite big enough when I laid it out ...

[Chris Padilla]

I had two sets of 4 drawers on a vanity recently that required their handles.

So I built a quickie jig to allow me to center the two-post handles.

Whipped off the first set of drawers...came out perfect (of course!).

I went to the second set of drawers and after popping the holes for one of them, I noticed something was off. I had forgotten that the second set of drawers were 1" smaller in width than the first set of drawers (heights were the same). This came about because in my design of the vanity, I neglected to offset the drawers next to the wall. In other words, odds are good the drawers would just scrape the wall and then hit the door casing and not open any further so I had to adjust everything. DOH!

Wait...it gets better.

So I plugged the holes in the drawer front...and redid my jig. Popped new holes in the drawers--all of them. Something was still off!

Somehow, my brain in doing some simple math got a difference of 25 when taking 60 and subtracting 15.

So far no one in the family has noticed that those set of drawer handles aren't quite centered since they all line up nicely.

It'll be our little secret....

[Jim Becker]

I recently measured 9 3/4" and my brain read 9 1/4".

Sadly, I do that all too often. Most of the time I catch it, but sometimes...not. :eek: (usually at that time when there's not another piece of the material milled and ready to cut as a replacement...LOL)

[Jim Dwight]

I make mistakes too, of course. Oversize is nice, less wasted material. The thing I do that helps the most is not to measure. Whenever reasonably possible I use a story stick. Or I take a door rail and put it in the opening to mark the length. Isn't always possible, of course. I also will dry assemble a door and put it in the opening when possible. Sometimes I can fix the mistake. Sometimes I can't. I would have rebuilt the doors too. If they were made of expensive hardwood I might have tried to figure out a way to use them (like put bead around the openings).

[Bill McNiel]

A couple of years ago I built 14 drawers, all identical and all too small. They sit on a shelf in the shop to remind me how fallible I am (someday I'm going to build a cabinet that fits them). Woodworking is not about never making mistakes, it is about correcting the error(s) so no one notices.

[Larry Edgerton]

I recently did a raised panel stairway, and raised the wrong side of all the parallelograms. Anyone doing the left side of a stairway?

[Jim Becker]

I recently did a raised panel stairway, and raised the wrong side of all the parallelograms. Anyone doing the left side of a stairway?
It's painful when a single project element is made incorrectly sized, but, wow...a whole stairwell side or a bunch of drawer like Bill just mentioned must be an excruciating experience!! I feel for you both...

[michael langman]

It's an awful feeling when you make a small multi shelve, 6 shelves, open type cabinet , wall hung that is supposed to fit about 60 small bottles of homeopathic medecine , AND THE BOTTLES DO NOT FIT ON THE SHELVES!

[Steve Demuth]

Or build a custom cabinet to hold a home entertainment projector with a gorgeous tambour roll top, into which said projector does not fit unless aligned in the space with 1/16" precision AND in it's not-ready-for-use storage configuration.

[michael langman]

Well at least your item fit Steve. Thankfully with all of your work. If you could only use it What a bummer.