Increments…

While traveling in northern WI, home of the historic lumber baron country, we stayed at a family member’s cabin in Polk County.  While navigating the GPS around the county, we encountered street after street with designations like “¼ Street” or (220 ½ Avenue).  And not just a few – many of them – 23 ¾, 48 5/8, etc – over and over.  In one sense, it was funny to see, but from another sense, it got me thinking.

 In real life, measurements serve a huge purpose.  Take, for example, food preparation. This culinary art uses both the general/approximate and the precise.   My wife’s grandmother baked in approximates – she just “knew” how much flour to add, what a “pinch of salt” really meant.  In fact, my wife’s aunts once chronicled Grandma Molly’s baking recipes by asking her to bake and then following her around the kitchen with measuring cups for every ingredient to ensure wholesome tastiness for generations to come.  But this also showed that a skilled crafter (a baker, for example) can live with approximates that come close to precision for things that don’t require precision down to the thousandths. 

 To be precise is a good thing in most of life.  This is critical in the certain parts of woodworking and metalworking.  To create a tenon of 1 ½ inches and to cut a mortise less than the tenon’s length will simply not work.  Approximates are not tolerable.  A box with sides of ever so slightly different lengths will NOT be square or true. 

 I have recently delved into the world of CNC woodworking with a Shaper Origin – a handheld CNC router.  It has tolerances of preciseness to the thousandths of an inch using a proprietary series of “domino-like” tape/images.  Never before have I been able to create hand works with such precision.  Inlays and onlays can be adjusted/trimmed to fit within a micro-hair difference.  Joinery has never been easier (once you figure out how to operate the equipment). 

 Back to my Polk County, WI illustration – does it really help navigate farmland and forests to know that between 20th Avenue and 22nd Avenue can be 21st Avenue just as well as 20 5/8th’s Avenue or 21 ½ Avenue?  The irony is - the bigger the scale (as in rural highways), the more exactness is less than helpful. 

 In woodworking, a woodworker has two paths they can use – the precise and the general.  Most of the time, we work in with world of the precise, but for design’s sake, we also live in the dynamic tension of the general. For example, is precision really needed when the wood’s grain or composition may suggest a looser design?  Yes, a chair needs to sit squarely on the floor, a drawer needs to be square to work properly, and we should use the tools to achieve this, but consider the other road -  a tabletop of 4/4 lumber planed down to a perfect “natural” thickness (rather than ½” or ¾”) to “optically fit” to its’ apron, spreader and legs can be a work of visual beauty and enjoyment.  

 Let us all walk these 2 paths – use the tools that can give us the preciseness we need when it is critical, but sometimes we need to walk a different path – a pathway where the “general/approximate” gives us a created piece of beauty and function.