Perfect vs. Good

 

From Adam Bager's post The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
 

Perfect is the enemy of good.

- Voltaire

Perfect is the enemy of done.

- Catherine Carrigan

Perfect vs. Good

Scant on wherewithal, experience, knowledge and wisdom. Rich in dreams and hope. Foolish youth embarked into a sun yet on the rise.

We sailed off the charts and beaten paths, beyond the lights and markers. Back ways through reef and slough. Up nameless rivers. Between scattered towns.

*****

It all began with a set of chisels…

They've arrived!!

We’d have flipped for it, but Anke loves opening packages, so she always wins.

A cut here, a snip there. Some eager shucking of wrapper, and a well-made cardboard box was revealed to our greedy eyes. We could smell the cherry blossoms brushed over an industrial green background. They framed a spare script writen in bold, black strokes and arranged in vertical columns.

Kanji… Japanese.

Flushed with anticipation, we canted the lid slowly back on its paper hinge, with each a hand on one corner to share this moment of discovery. 

There! Lying in eight parallel compartments, each aglow with a rainbow sheen of oil. There they lay. Our beautiful set of temple builders’ chisels lying side by side.

Their lemony, heart centered, box-wood handles were steel ringed and socketed. We could see the darker line of steel edge we knew to be hardened, bonded to a laminate of polished metal visible as a sinuous line across the just-so bevel .

Trembling, Anke reached out her hand to lift one, turning it over to expose the underside hollows… Hollows! …that had been ground into their lower face. An ancient method, we had read, to reduce friction while paring.

These chisels were no ordinary tools. They were fit to build homes for the gods! 

Nor were they cheap. For us, they represented a significant investment in our future afloat. As sailors and masters of our own vessels, we would see to their needs as they would see to ours. 

BRAMBLE, a clinker-built British life-boat, was our first home together. She had been converted to a sailing cruiser sometime in the dim past. We had bought her as-is, hoping to learn, through her, initial sailing and boatwright skills. A strategic stepping stone on the way to a proper yacht.

She was in need of serious work. Now we had serious tools. 

Reverently, we took up the chisel appropriate to the task. A gentle, forward pressure and a feather of larch curled upward and back upon itself. Devoid of effort, this magical tool glided forth to do its work. 

Straight and true and clean and — TINK. 

Hmm… that sounded like we hit something. It sure felt like we hit something. And… a gnat-sized chip now marred our previously perfect edge!

We glared accusingly into the cut and a tiny, metallic glint sneered back. It was the jaundiced yellow of a coppery wire strand, souvenir of some long-ago brushing.

Many hours with a stone (finest waterstone, of course) elapsed. Many timorous taps with the special mallet backed the hollows away from the edge, proportional to the material we’d removed. The edge was restored!

Well. To spare you agonizing repetition, our very next efforts met with the same INSUFFERABLE results.

We traded our beautiful chisels to an overjoyed boatwright (who dealt in new construction with only the highest grades of wood) for a plain set of framing chisels. Cheap, robust and easy to maintain the edge.

*****

In hindsight this trade was our first entrance into 'the real world' where perfection isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's not bad in itself, but more like a guideline, really.

Perfect is elusive, fragile and an end-in-itself. Good is at-hand, rough-and-ready and gits 'er did.

It's a choice.

Learning to Trust Myself

Kyūzō from Seven Samurai
by Akira Kurusawa

I wish someone would give me a whole box of those sharpening guides and gizmos... so I could have the pleasure of dumping them overboard!

-- Dynamite Payson (as remembered)

Learning to Trust Myself

I'm one of those guys who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to find the easy way forward. Sometimes, this effort pays handsomely. Other times, I waste my effort in attempting to fix what ain't broke.

At present, we're building a boat in at least semi-traditional style. That is to say, it's plywood, but fastened  and bedded -- rather than glued -- together. Mostly. The critical joinery must be carefully and correctly shaped without reliance on modern, gap-filling adhesives. This calls on skills which are rusty at best and at worst heretofore unacquired.

Two cases in point...

Rolling Bevels

Rolling bevels are a cut along an edge where the bevel is not constant, but rather rolls along a gradient between known angles. This kind of loosey-goosey process is terrifying to my ordered mind, and I have successfully eliminated them from TriloBoat construction.

We once were drafted into a professional effort to roll a bevel along a long, thick, expensive plank. One pro ran the plank through a bandsaw while another called out angles marked at intervals along the plank. The angle of cut was changed by angling the plate with a protractor/handle arrangement. Our job was to shift the handle "slowly" and "smoothly", transitioning between the angles being called out.

I mean, c'mon! I can call out numbers as they slide by me with one eye covered. But to make the correct transition? THAT is a pro job foisted upon us amateurs.

But now, we're faced with rolling bevels in our own build, on our own petard.

Back to first principles: We basically have two, parallel faces. A fair curve along one edge is known from the plans. We know the edge angle at several points along that curve and also that they are increasing -- slowly and smoothly -- at known points along its length. Hmm. So if we figure out (by a simple lofting) the offset each angle makes across the thickness of the piece and plot those points on their stations, we can draw a second fair curve on the second face. Plane the edge to meet the two curves and voila! The perfect curve, de-terrified.

Ply Scarfs

For various (probably trivial) reasons, we chose to scarf the ply sides together rather than use our usual butt-straps. Conditions dictated 8in scarfs for 3/4in plywood.

Now there are an endless number of jigs possible for this, but they take time, materials and brainpower likely exceeding the job itself (in our one-off case).

First we tried the method we used on SLACKTIDE... step each sheet back 8in, fix a 2x4 runner to our circular saw to bridge the 'steps' and, with the salient depth set to 3/4in, have at.

Having at means scoring along at about 1/8in intervals, knocking that thin wall out with the blade and, using intact steps to support the 2x4 and saw, side-sweeping the flat with the tangent of the blade.

This works, but is strenuous going. I took it in stride 16 years ago, but am huffing and a-puffing, now! Worse, unlike in SLACKTIDE, our present ply finished rough with this method.

Oh well, score the steps less frequently and use the planer to the depth they indicated. But, hmm... that turned out rough, too. What's more, I did 99% of the job with the planer by eye, then carefully removed the last smidgeon guided by the scoring.

Conclusion? Try it by eye as the sole means. Result? Better results in half the time with only a quarter the effort.

In short, I'd have save myself a lot of time and trouble, wear and tear if I'd trusted myself from the beginning. Sure, there's a learning curve, but no worse than more involved methods.

NOTE: We use LPU (Liquid PolyUrethane), a modern, gap-filling adhesive, for ply scarfs, so the matching planes don't have to be utterly perfect... just good enough.

*****

We d0 need to be clear on the principles and constraints involved. I'm not talking Blind-Man's Bluff, here. There is a certain amount of letting go and winging it, but that lies in our increasing control of our bodies first, and of our tools as extensions. 

We have the luxury to inform ourselves from past masters and present. We have the luxury to practice on scrap. We can Assess, Address and Appraise.

So... ready, set, practice, go and get 'er did!