It's Lee Valley's fault. . . . (long)

I was in a fretful mood, so it was "Don't work on the current project, but piddle and clean-up time."

Let me take you back a few months, right after Thanksgiving, the question came up again. It was "What do you want for Christmas?" As I have done in the past, I took a black Sharpie and circled several items in the Lee Valley Christmas catalog. I never thought any more about it, but the person that drew my name gave me everything I had circled, I had expected as in the past they would select one or two items and be done with it. (If I'd known I was going get everything I circled, you can bet the bevel up jack plane would have been circled. :-) )

Well, one of the things I circled was the aluminum straight edge. My benefactor saw the steel straight edge guaranteed to be accurate to +/-

0.001" or some ridiculous thing like that, so I got the steel one. Fast forward to today . . .

The work bench I built last year has a 24"X72" maple top., I was going to make the top, but the finished top was considerably cheaper that the wood cost to build it, and besides the finished top was dead flat! I don't know how it happened, but the straight edge ended up on my dead flat work bench and Gasp. . . . . ., I could see daylight under the straight edge! Well, this won't do. . . I slipped a sheet of paper under the straight edge . . . it took three sheets to fill the gap. I break out my garage sale micrometer and can you believe the bench had (note the had) a

0.015" low spot in it.

Well, this was just wrong. That means the rocking chair I built earlier this year doesn't sit flat on the floor, after all I had leveled the chair on my dead flat bench. So I spent 2 hours with my jointer hand plane removing translucent shavings from the top. I gave up when the gap got to be 0.008", then I got to thinking,

It is all Lee Valley's fault, because if that darned straight edge had not been in their catalog, I would never have known the bench top was not dead flat.

I'm glad that I'm not one of those anal old fuddy-duddies that permeate the woodworker ranks :-)

Reply to
Lowell Holmes
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I guess you didn't see the first-ever LeeValley recall?

They had a lot of steel straight edges with a 0.015 bow in the middle.

Too bad.

tic

Reply to
tabergman

"Lowell Holmes" gloated

This is totally irrational behavior. I love it though.

Any way I could entice this individual to become a part of my family??

Reply to
Lee Michaels

Before escaping from the work-a-day world, I spent decades making transportation system demand forecasts - computerized forecast modeling. The input to this model was mind boggling - 10,000 street, expressway, highway and freeway segments, each with 10 pieces of information - lenght, speed, XY coordinates of each end, hourly capacity, facility type etc,

605 "traffic analysis zones" each of which had 6 dwelling unit types and 8 non-residential number of jobs. The ouput was even more fun - six 605 x 605 matrices with the number of trips, by six trip purposes, between each pair of TAZs. When you're Crystal Balling twenty years out, there were a lot of assumptions about things that would change between now and then.

An old dutchman co-worker used to stop by while I was pouring over foot thick printouts and wall sized color coded and annotated by street segment, by direction plots of a forecast's output, checking the cojmputer output for "reasonableness" (a word that's probably not in any dictionary but sounded better than looking for F**K UPS). Dirk would stand there sucking on his pipe (you could still smoke in offices back then) and remind me that "assume" can make an ass out of you (U) and me.

I came to appreciate how true that was when I got into woodworking. I assumed

- that the S4S board I'd paid a micro fortune on was actually Four Square, the faces were parallel as were the edges and that the edges were straight

- that when the pointer on my table saw's blade tilt arrow pointed to zero that the blade was square to the table top

- that the saw blade was parallel to the miter slot

- that the rip fence was parallel to the saw blade

- that the saw arbor had no run out : : :

By the third or fourth project that didn't fit together the way it was supposed to and the four table legs weren't actually the same length ----, I became a believer in Better To Know Than To Assume and got a couple of engineer squares, a couple of straight edges that were certified straight - at least to 0.003 AND Ed Bennett's TS-Aligner Jr. Deluxe. Got me to read the manuals and find out how to adjust things that were Out of Spec - or out of what I expected.

Amazing how project parts go together when assumed and reality are the same or close enough for practical purposes.

The downside of "knowing" is learning what's "close enough".

charlie b

Reply to
charlieb

Ah, yer a cold, cruel fella there. [I like that in a person] ;-)

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Reply to
Mark & Juanita

... snip

Hope this doesn't qualify:

I'm working on panels for a headboard and have got the rails and stiles fit and today I was shaping the panel profiles and fitting the panels. There are 4 panels in this assembly and I had cut them slightly too wide, such that all four will not fit, there is about 1/8" between all 4 of the panels tha needs to be trimmed. Got out the LN low angle block plane and started planing some shavings to fine-tune the fit. Got to thinking that I really didn't want to be doing the plane-reprofile-fit-replane cycle so ...

I took one of the shavings from the block plane and got out the calipers, measuring 0.003 (closer to 0.0028) per shaving. Got out the calculator, determined that for 8 sides, I needed to remove about 0.0156 per side which equated to about 6 block plane passes per side. Took 6 passes per side, re-profiled and re-fit: result: fit the way it was intended.

Oh, and for the really AR old fuddy-duddies -- yes, I can get better than

0.003 thickness shavings out of the plane, I had it deliberately set for a thicker cut.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Reply to
Mark & Juanita

I am disappointed. If you were a true AR neander, you would have used long division by hand with a pencil with a hand carved point. Not a calculator.

Not anal retentive enough if you ask me. :)

Reply to
Lee Michaels

calculator.

Bah! Abacus.

Reply to
Mike Marlow

Sorry, dude ... a true neander would only use his fingers (excluding the one currently in his nose).

Reply to
Swingman

True, and the one in his nose serves another, less immediate purpose. It pulls out that long stringy stuff that can conveniently be used to stretch over an object for a measurement, then stuck in the pocket as a record of that measurement. Sorta like the predecessor to the story pole.

Reply to
Mike Marlow

eeeeeccch ... More info than I needed. That'll teach me to be a smartass. ;)

Reply to
Swingman

Ooooooh... that's just mean....

I like it.

:)

Reply to
Rob Lee

You are a very bad person! I like you!

Vic

Reply to
Vic Baron

Great story!

Reply to
B A R R Y

Reply to
B A R R Y

I thought it was the original rubber cement!

Earwax works great where you don't want the glue to stick.

Reply to
B A R R Y

Darn! I am shamed :-(

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Reply to
Mark & Juanita

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