Popular Woodworking 2000-04 № 114, страница 63

Out of the Woodwork

The Art of Making Mistakes

My woodworking was so incredibly bad, it was genius.

My father was a home repair genius.

What else do you call a man who needs only one tool for every household repair?

Of course, that tool was the telephone. He'd call a carpenter to put up a towel rack or a furniture maker to assemble a spice rack kit. No mess, no fuss, no ability required. And I inherited all his skills.

So when I decided to pursue a career in woodworking, it was a surprise to everyone, including myself. Even more surprising was that I actually got a job as a woodturner in a shop that made reproduction Windsor chairs.

During my interview, the boss asks if I know how to use a table saw, tapping the machine sitting on the shop floor next to us. Well, I'd never used a table saw. But I can see on the machine a green button that says "Start" and a red button that says "Stop."

So I say, "Well, I know you press the green button to start it and the red button to stop it."

"That's the jointer," he says. He hired me anyhow. I never asked him why.

My boss was really good at what he did. He tells me, "Cut this off at 9³/l6ⁿ," and then he makes a casual mark on the wood.

So I pull out the tape measure to mark the cut. After 45 minutes of struggle, I get the tape measure pointing the right direction. Along the way I whip myself three times with the retracting tape. Worried that I'd measured Vs" plus one of the little marks by accident, I try to hold both ends of the tape and a pencil at the same time. I whip myself in the face one more time and finally get a mark on the wood. It turns out my boss's mark is exactly 9" plus ¹/s" plus one of those little marks.

After he hired me, the first thing he did was take me to the lathe and point to the green and red buttons. "You press the green to start it and the red to stop it," he says. He never could understand why I'd make mistakes. I'd be turning a detail on a chair

leg, the skew would catch, gouge the leg and fling it off the lathe.

My boss was curious. "Why did you do that?"

"Sorry. It was a mistake."

"Well, it's better if you don't catch the skew like that."

"Oh, I know that. It was an accident," I say.

"OK. But you shouldn't ram the tool in there."

"Yes, I know, but it slipped."

"Oh, I see," my boss says. "Well, don't let it slip, then."

"Right. I didn't mean to. I mean, it was unintentional," I say.

"It's just that if you gouge a huge divot out of the leg and it careens across the shop, we can't use it."

"It was a mistake!" I say.

He looks at me like I'm speaking in tongues. He simply can't understand why I make mistakes.

So I think of a compromise. Whenever I ruin a leg, I hide it in the corner. At the end of the day, I toss all the legs into the

dumpster outside. Then everyone will be happy.

Six months later, I still don't know ³/l6" from ³/4", but at least I'm ruining fewer legs every day.

But then an artist whose studio is next door invites my boss and me to look at her new art. We go to her studio. We assume expressions of polite interest. She points at her art.

There, wrapped in velvet, are six months worth of ruined chair legs, painted, glued, shaped, assembled and framed. My mistakes had become her medium. She fished legs I ruined out of the dumpster and had the complete collection. All the legs were there: the irreparably gouged, the stupidly misshapen, the absently severed, the overly bulbous, the structurally unsound and the indescribably ugly.

Ask not for whom the phone rings, it rings for you. It's me. "I need help putting this spice rack together." PW

Joel Naftali is a writer who on occasion gets his mouse stuck in his keyboard, gouging the keys out and sending the external drive careening across the office.