An Obsession With Perfection
Engineering and probably Business students aswell as Demographers somewhere along the line encounter The S Curve. Take an ?S? and grab the lower left and upper right end and begin pulling them apart horizontally. If you pull them far enough apart you end up with a straight line sloping upward from the lower end to the upper end. Before that you start moving the tangent line to where the two curves intersect, flattening the reverse curve towards a straight line.
What?s this have to do with woodworking?
Well - I?m after the proverbial Bang For The Buck relationship. In the example below, you can see that initially, getting a little BANG doesn?t require a lot of BUCKS. But as the BANG goes up the BUCKS start to go up even faster. At some point on this ?S? Curve the BUCKS required for more BANG starts going up really quickly. To get that last 5% of the desired BANG may cost 4000% more BUCKS.
I want this much BANG v |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
0 | 0 | 0 B | 0 A | O N | 0 G | 0 0---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BUCKS TO GET THE BANG (Time & Energy To Get The Desired Result)So what does this have to do with woodworking?
Replace BUCKS with BUCKS plus time and energy.
You?ve got an idea for a piece -be it a turning or a piece of furniture. How far along the S Curve are you willing to go before you decide the piece is done?
I?m going to use some things I?ve recently been turning - small delicate stuff for an example of my question of BANG vs BUCKS - or more accurately - RESULTS vs TIME / ENERGY.
By working small, I could experiment with several techniques, woods and a boat load of shapes and forms - without spending a lot of time and effort on what might be a dead end. The techniques and shapes/forms will work for ?full sized? pieces so I can work out just about everything at a small scale - except for ?finishing?. It?s tricky to get a fine surface on small things that have a lot of tight spaces that are difficult to get to with sandpaper, let alone a film finish. And small delicate things are hard to sand anyway since the slightest pressure can either destroy crisp edges - or snap the piece in two.
So I can quickly turn interesting ideas, doing the shapes and learning the techniques, but can?t get a near perfect finish. Were I to turn these pieces ?full scale? I could take the process all the way through to a nice finish. BUT - that?d take a lot more wood, some hard to acquire and somewhat pricey - and it?d take a LOT more time and effort.
And that got me thinking. Some turners seem obsessed with getting a glass smooth finish on their pieces - even under magnification, not a scratch is to be seen. But the time and effort to get to that point seems a long ways from the creative - and fun part - of the turning and out in the low bang for the buck end of the S curve.
Between a perfectly turned piece, with a perfect shape, including its base and throat, in THE perfect wood, with the perfect glass smooth finish - inside AND outside - and a cube of wood with a circle drawn on each face (Gary Knox Bennett won a presitgious turning competition with his submittal of the latter) there?s a lot of time and effort, to say nothing of the skill required.
So my question is-
Given that there?s a Point of Diminishing Returns along the S Curve To Perfection, how far along the curve are you normally willing to go? Is turning a shape that?s close enough to what you had in mind enough to ?call it good? or will you chuck up another blank and try to get the shape better? For a hollow form, how much time - and risk - are you willing to take to get the wall thickness almost perfectly uniform, or thinned to say 1/8th inch? How much time are you willing to spend to develop a Final Finishing/Burnishing Cut technique that leaves a nice smooth shiny surface which requires NO finishing at all? Are you willing to sand to 1500 or even 6000 grit BEFORE applying the first of many layers of finish, each sanded out to the Nth degree to arrive at a finish that looks like it?s an inch thick - ie Car Show Paint Job finish?
To put the question another way-
Is doing just enough, and a bit more, to convey the idea enough for you to say ?It?s Done?, -the rest is just grunt work - or do you want to go all the way to the Perfect Finish Line, regardless of how much time and effort will be required to get there?
Personally, I really like a the look of a good French Polish on a piece of furniture - with dewaxed shellac of course, perhaps in Garnet. I?ve spent hours applying over a dozen french polished coats of shellac to the top of a sharpening station cabinet -knowing full well it?ll get wet and will get scratched. But there?s something about a broad flat surface of wood that has a glass finish on it that appeals to me. However, on turned wood, I prefer a sanded ?close enough? (scratches not visible unless you look real hard) and burnished with brown paper bag paper finish. Maybe it?s because the broad flat surface of a table top isn?t meant to be picked up and explored with your finger tips like a turned piece begs youto do (at least to really nice pieces). There is a very subtle feel to wood which I believe is lost when a finish, be it a wax or a friction polish, is applied to it.
And to date, I?ve not turned anything that I didn?t think could be modified to make it better. Sometimes that will lead to a ?series? - the Spinarettes and their Peg offspring being a recent example.
So where do you Draw The Line - and why? How Obsessed With Perfection are YOU?
Charlie b