My father is an amazing wood worker. All my life he has a project going and when he finishes it, it looks flawless. Chairs, chests, shelves, even a phone booth. Genetically, I feel like I too should have some kind of talent in this department but when it comes to patience, my Dad has it in spades over me. Years back I decided that I wanted to build an entertainment center to house our electronic equipment and DVDs. I drew up some plans and ran them by my father. We discussed them and modified them and ultimately came up with something workable that wasn’t very far off from my original design. Soon it was time for me to put my money where my mouth was and actually start cutting some wood. I felt the pressure of my father’s shadow looming over me as I began my work.

While the entertainment center was not complicated, it was large so there were some pretty significant cuts that needed to be made in the wood. I pulled out my speed square, made some measurements and drew lines on the board. Now a speed square is a triangular piece of metal with a right angle on it. You basically put one side on the edge of the board and the other side of the speed square is automatically perpendicular to the board edge. You just run your pencil down the side and you should have a good cut.

Now an important concept in woodworking is keeping things square. If your cuts are not square, then when you assemble whatever you are working on, it will be lopsided and weak. So as I was assembling my entertainment center, I kept checking to see if things were square. Along the way I discovered that slowly, things were becoming less square as I cut and assembled more parts. Now my father would have stopped there and taken things apart to fix the problem, but I plowed on ahead. In the end, I had my entertainment center and as a whole it looked good and was sturdy. I was proud of my accomplishment as I wheeled it into the living room and started placing electronic components in it.

The good news is that this story doesn’t end with the whole thing falling apart and my TV crashing to the floor. The entertainment center is still working fine and I’m still proud of it. Over time, though, I notice more and more things about it that just don’t look right. Certain boards aren’t level, some things aren’t square, the finish is not as good as I hoped, etc. I chocked it up to being my first project. Soon I embarked on others. I built shelves for my daughter’s room, a full-size arcade cabinet for the living room (it is really sweet), and currently I’m working on a play kitchen for Hope.

For the kitchen I really wanted to make it right so over the holiday weekend I went to work assembling it, having cut the wood a few weeks before. I kept checking and double checking things and soon had the basic shape assembled and it was square and level. I continued installing pieces and life was good until I came to the final one that separated the play oven from the play cabinets. It just did not fit in correctly. So I fired up the table saw and trimmed it down a little. As I did I noticed that the piece of wood was not square and it was supposed to be. I worked around the issue but it bothered me, especially considering how careful I was when I cut the pieces out in the first place.

Retracing my steps I discovered where the problem lay. My speed square was not square. It was off just a small amount so that the line I drew was not perpendicular, but rather slightly off. By the time I reached the other side of a four-foot board, I was way out of wack. I immediately threw the square in the trash.

Now there are a lot of different ways I could apply my woodworking experience but the one I want to focus on is the speed square. A tiny piece of extra metal on this tool caused me to have larger problems down the road. How much simpler my life would have been if I had discovered this earlier. I would have gotten a new one and there would be a lot less working around problems in my projects. Small issues become big issues down the road.

This ties in with what I wrote about yesterday in that if you are constantly reevaluating things in your life, you will be able to correct issues before they become major. It is also important to look at the tools you are using to evaluate. If the information you are using is slightly off, your results will be as well. Question your assumptions and test them out. Make sure that what you are measuring is indeed what you are measuring. This can save you a lot of heart ache down the road. And you entertainment center will look a whole lot better.