Lessons from the shop (12/11/02)

A favorite hobby of mine is woodworking. There is great satisfaction in turning timber into something useful or decorative around the house. Working with one’s hands is as old as mankind, whether with wood or other materials.

There are lessons-in-the-shop about life as well. Like just using the fence on a table saw, for example. It enables one to saw a straight edge better compared to sawing along a line with a saw without a straight edge. A "fence" in life might be a role-model parent, or a special book that you are sure is true. There are techniques that can be used with a fence to make crooked boards straight as well.

The use of templates is somewhat similar. To place drawer handles, for example, at the same place on each drawer and aligned properly, it is much better to use a template than to measure for each one individually. In the case of attaching various metal things to wood or concrete, a template can assure that the holes in the metal line up with those in the dissimilar materials. It’s unlikely that this will happen even with careful measurements, especially when drilling into a softer material or even concrete with its non-homogenous makeup (embedded gravel).

A "template" in life could be similar to the "fence" described earlier. There is, however, the added feature of joining two, often dissimilar, parts together. Some marriages are like that. Without a "template" for guidance, disharmony can result instead of harmony. There is just about nothing on television or at the movies that serves as this kind of template, so don’t look for it there. Good counsel will play a much better role.

I recently needed a short length of crown molding that is no longer available. Finding a smaller shape that could be altered slightly to make the larger shape that was needed, I glued additional sides onto it, making a sort of jig that I could then begin cutting on. With some careful sawing on the table saw, I was able to partially cut away the attached material to match the crown molding shape that was needed.

Maybe the parallel in life to this new piece of molding is in the area of vocation. Often we have to add to what we have by learning more, then fine tuning the sum of the parts (what we knew and what we have learned) to come up with the "shape" of the vocation to which we aspire.

Putting together a metal stair kit was a new experience. There were fittings that were supposed to slip into square, hollow tubes, but the "fit" was unbelievably tight. Even by heating the tubes and getting the fittings cold, no amount of hammering with a hard rubber hammer would get them into place. But the slow clamping action of a big clamp moved them in place successfully.

Sometimes life is like that. We think we can "pound something into place" in our lives with short, frantic stints of doing all that we can do as hard as we can. But instead, it is the slow, steady pressure (cranking the screw-clamp) of doing the right thing that gets the job done.

There are a wide array of analogies in the physical world of the woodshop and real life. Some of these have been described above. Others include filling the voids to make long lasting pressurized lumber, using "biscuit" joints instead of dowels to join two pieces of wood, the process of tapping screw-threads in metal, and even addressing the question, "why do boards get crooked in the first place?"

In two weeks, we celebrate the birth of the master Carpenter.

Dr. Malcolm Cutchins is an emeritus professor of engineering of Auburn University and writes a weekly column for The Opelika-Auburn News.