Measure Twice, Cut a Couple Extra

I was working on a small box today that I plan to donate to a local charity auction. It involves half lap joinery and Japanese origami paper. Some of you may remember it from an older Fine Woodworking article by Gary Rogowski. I bought a whole stack of origami paper when I was on vacation up in Maine and have been mulling over this design in my head for a few months. Of course wouldn’t you know that someone else had already thought of it so I figured why fight it and adopted some of the elements of Mr. Rogowski’s design.

Regardless, as I was applying a coat of Polycrylic to adhere the paper to the box bottom I was thinking about the steps to the construction and a possible blog entry. Suddenly it occured to me that there was one step that I integrate into all my projects that I was forgetting about. This was probably the most important step of all! Cut an extra part. I’m not talking about cutting an extra table leg in case you make a mistake; but rather, cutting an extra that you can use to test your machine set ups. Sometimes I make an extra of several pieces but usually there is a step in a build where you know that precision is paramount and I will just make an extra piece for that one bit of joinery.

The advantage of this is you have a piece of the same dimensions and species to play with. You can run it over the router table and then measure the result to insure that your groove it exactly 1 29/32nd from the edge or you can verify that the depth of that half lap is just shy of the thickness of the mating piece so you can flush the joint by planing face grain rather than end grain.

This extra piece goes a really long way and by the end of the project may be just a shadow of itself, destined to be thrown away, but it is indispensible to the proper completion of the project as a whole.

So this project’s employee of the month is: inanimate carbon rod!, oops sorry Matt Groening, I mean extra test piece!