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The general downturn in business gave me the opportunity to take on the project of building my own kayak. Like any proper project, I hadn't really thought about how much time or money until I was in too deep (so to speak) to abort. I logged 100 hours. Some kitchens I do take less time!
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 Much has been said about Covid-19's rapid spread across the world, and it certainly is disorienting to consider how "normal" things were just 2 months ago.
As fast as the virus's timeline is, the speed at which people can move to confront it is even faster. Consider this timeline-- March 23--Taiwanese doctor puts a design on the web for an intubation box, meant to protect doctors when patients need to be put on ventilators April 2--I watch a video put out by a west coast closet shop demonstrating fabrication of these intubation boxes April 4--Put out email to every medical professional I know asking if this is something they could use April 6--One Chief Medical Officer responds. His hospital can use 10, can I get a prototype to them? April 14--I source some acrylic plexiglass, and put a few hours in watching YouTube videos on how to bend and glue plexiglass, and deliver a prototype April 17--Delivered 9 more boxes. Literally 3 weeks from idea to delivery. The internet made it possible to get the information from the other side of the world where it was generated, to shops like mine, to places where these items are needed. Try a web search for face shields or masks. Practically overnight, people have generated designs for these items, using common materials, and posted their work online for all to benefit from. Amidst the detritus of internet content, there is some real stuff, doing real good.  I don't often need to use this, but when I do, there is no substitute. Just about everything else in my installation tools is wired, or wireless. Or has something else I could use instead. For example, I typically have at least 5 different tools for cutting, generically called a "saw." But there is only one plumb bob. A plumb bob is used to to establish plumb, i.e. straight up and down. My most recent occasion to use it was when I needed to establish the point location on the ceiling, but referenced off the floor, 13' below. You unwind the string until the pointed metal weight is just above the point being referenced. A helper slows the weight from swaying back and forth like the pendulum it is, until it's over the point. Then I can mark the point on the ceiling that is perfectly over the point on the floor. In the project below, the position of the ladder was determined from the floor, but I needed to know where to cut into the angled ceiling at the top to secure the ladder. A level, even a digital one, would not be accurate enough..  I lost a kitchen job recently, which is not all that unusual; after all, it's a competitive marketplace. What makes it worthy of a blog post is that I'm pretty sure I didn't get the job because I offered the prospective client a paint grade door material that was superior to the wood they were considering and cost a few thousand dollars less. For a painted door, my material of choice is MDF, or medium density fiberboard. Why? 1. The panels stay flatter than a wood door 2. Moisture-resistant MDF withstands water much better than a wood door, which makes it ideal for bathrooms and wet areas in the kitchen. In theory, homeowners should like the material better too, because it's cheaper than a wood door. Which brings me to the kitchen job. The homeowner wanted a wood door, with a solid wood panel. Doors with solid wood panels can be problematic, as wood changes size according to humidity, and this can cause the door to warp. If the panel is wood, it will expand and contract according to the moisture content of the air. If the panel shrinks too much, it will expose unpainted parts of the door. Modern materials like MDF and synthetic stone often get a reputation as being lower-quality than the natural materials they are intended to replace. Properly used, however, they are usually superior. When a potential client tells me they want "all wood," it's often not the wood they want, but a high quality product. And sometimes that means MDF, not wood!
One of these projects features wood doors, the other is MDF. Can you tell the difference?
 This picture shows the edge of a piece of plywood imported from China. Besides the delamination, a metal screw or nail can be seen where the plies are separating. A colleague discovered this when cutting the plywood on his CNC. I can imagine his heart skipping a few beats when he heard the screeching sound of metal on metal when the compression bit made contact with this foreign object.
Not all plywood from China is bad. Not all domestic plywood is good. My experience, though, has been to stick with the higher quality material--which in the case of plywood, tends to be American or Canadian and not Chinese. In the words of John Ruskin (1819-1900)-- "It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money--that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better." Of all the things that have changed professionally over the last 30 years, the one that astounds me the most is how I make what I make. B-a-a-ack in 1986, making a kitchen included drawing it with a pencil, ordering a large stack of rough lumber to make the doors, cutting plywood on a table saw, and using a drill to make the holes for shelves and hardware. There was a dumpster in case anything went wrong. In 2016, making the same kitchen includes drawing it on the computer (want to see it in 3-d?), ordering the doors online from a specialty manufacturer (who will also spray finish them if you want), and using CNC to cut cabinet parts and do any machining required for shelves and hardware. A story: last year I attended training sessions to better utilize the software I use. The learning curve has been fearsome, but worth it. During one of the breaks, I attempted to engage one of the other (younger) attendees in some shop talk. I asked him how long he had been in cabinetmaking. "Eight years," he replied. Newbie, I thought. "It must be hard, absorbing all this information." "Neah," he replied. "I was a computer science major in college." I don't have any nostalgia for milling 100 board feet of lumber, or marking out every single hole by hand. I don't even mind that a large chunk of my woodworking know-how is irrelevant to producing your kitchen. The fact is, a person with computer skills (and presumably some knowledge of cabinetmaking) represents the state of the art. And I still have a dumpster, in case anything goes wrong.
The Binah School (www.thebinahschool.org), a small Modern Orthodox day school for girls, doesn't have room in their building for a shop. But the founders' commitment to project-based learning takes the students out of the classroom to see math, science and technology in action. "Today’s global economy creates a demand for adults with problem-solving and critical thinking skills, collaborative experience and technological expertise." I had the pleasure of hosting the students at my shop. The girls had learned about CAD (computer aided design) and each "made" a tile to be cut on the cnc. Alas, the drawings were not formatted in a way that I could easily turn their CAD files into G-code. So after explaining the basics, the students and I designed a sign in my office that they took with them. At first, the machine's dust skirt prevented them from seeing anything. But when the machine moved away from the work to grab another bit, the girls saw what they had created. They clapped, shouted and jumped up and down. That doesn't happen enough in school, don't you think?  Explaining that a cnc is just a bigger router with a computer attached to it...  How thick is the material? These three try out a digital caliper  The sign the girls had me make. I don't know who Dennis is...  What's going on under the dust skirt?  The forklift is pretty cool, too! 
A colleague shared this anecdote on a cabinetmaking forum recently. The rest of the story is about how the homeowner got a great deal online for bath vanities that turned out, unsurprisingly, to be junk. This is the funny part. "I just delivered the island portion of a kitchen this morning. The contactor installed the base and wall cabinets in the home last week. When I showed up at the site this morning the owners college age son was nice enough to help me unload them. During the course of the conversation the kid asked me in surprise." Did you make these cabinets?" When I told that I had. He said " Gee they are so beautiful I thought they came from the Internet."" 
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Erik BittnerBecause not everything useful or fun in my field will fit in a web tab. Archives
August 2020
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