If you take “good enough” out of your vocabulary you are precluding yourself from ever doing any government work down the road where “good enough” is the pretty much the mantra. I just don’t want you to pigeonhole yourself to quality work all the time. ;-]

Enjoying the evolution of your site and the network… keeps gettin better and better! Even though it was good enough for me before it started walking upright….. (ehhh, yeah… weak play on the evolution reference and the “good enough” theme… ok, I’ll shut up now)
-Charles

They don’t see them because they know what they intended to write and that’s what they see when they read it.

Jim

Interesting how this topic has been running around different blogs in some form over the past week.

Perfection is a term of performance that has to be quantified; to just say something is perfect; is purley subjective, therefore open ended.

The issue really is quality not perfection. W. Edwards Deming (quality manager) in some form would say project quality is determined by designing processes that will produce higher quality.

Each of us have different tooling, different processes, and different levels of experience that we build with. Inherently in our garages/basements, we all build to different levels of quality based off the processes we’ve designed prior to construction and execution.

Robert’s post below……….says it pretty good:

Robert Ragland on March 2nd, 2008 6:40 pm …..Said:

Gosh! Whatever happened to just enjoying woodworking. Striving for perfection sometimes leads to nothing ever geting finished and trying to go beyond what you are capable of at the moment can lead to fustration. Just do your best and say that this is the best I can do at this time. But most of all enjoy what you are doing

I will add this…….perfection can be attained if you set quantifiable criteria prior to building……..as Robert states where’s the fun there.

But completing a build to your quality level, evaluating, re-designing your process (new tool, different material, more pre-production thought, same joinery/differnet joinery) then building again to a higher quality, then repeating the process as often as you can, equates to building all the time and having fun as you watch your quality get higher and higher or if you wish better and better.

I’m not into perfection but like all of you, am into designing processes that lead to higher quality.

Build and build often……….Neil

Part of becoming a professional is to learn where it is OK to cut corners. But most of us have to learn on the job. I think if woodworking is your livelihood and you tried to achieve perfection before you are skilled enough to still work fast, you would die of starvation. I know I would, and happily it’s not my profession.

Not trying to make an excuse for laziness, but a predefined/measured amount of imperfection. That can be very little imperfection if you so choose. Not sanding between coats is a great example of laziness that pays poor dividends. Gluing in a shim instead of recutting a bunch of dovetails might be a pretty good tradeoff, not because it’s lazy but because it’s cost effective.

Very interesting topic

If someone as advanced as David Marks can take his time to make things right, by golly I sure can!

As for the book case, the tenons actually were slightly proud. They just appear flush in the picture.

As for more pics, that’s really about all we have. Nicole only had a chance to snap a few choice shots, and about half of them came out like crap because of the wacky lighting. The ones in the post are the pick of the litter. :)

Can’t say I like the flush through tenon on the bookcase though. I’d rather not see them, or have them proud of the surface.

But that’s just me.