Translating Experience

I seem to often translate experience from one familiar field to another. My recent experience with this in the last few weeks was in assembling a new jointer and table saw.

A few years ago when the economy took its downturn, I built a few bicycles in the workshop mainly to keep myself productively occupied with something else other than woodworking. It was a great opportunity to transfer mechanical skill to bicycle building, and it was something new to me. I spent a lot of time learning about new parts, their names, what they did, and the special tools required to mount and adjust them on a bicycle frame. I developed skills needed to get everything mounted, aligned, and adjusted correctly.

The assembly and alignment of woodworking equipment had never been something that I took as seriously as bicycle assembly. I think a lot of woodworkers are like this because our skill set is woodworking and not necessarily the mechanical aspects of machinery. We are also more interested in putting a new machine to use than we are in its assembly.

I had thought that the brief time I spent building bicycles left me with a healthy hobby, but not much beyond that until I started to assemble the new jointer and table saw where I began to notice how uncharacteristically meticulous I was about each stage of their respective assembly. That does not mean that my work is now better for it, but it does mean that I have a better understanding of what a machine can bring to the process of building by better understanding how it achieves accuracy and operation.

#hashtagging #design

I plan to build an organ again. It will be different from what I built in the past because it would not need to be built for the requirements of church use. It will be a small instrument built to accompany one or a few voices, or maybe another solo instrument.

But just what this organ would look like I was not quite sure. Many approaches came to mind as I began to think of different ways to build the organ, but none of those were starting to focus on any one single design.

There is an interesting tool now used by most social networking sites, the hashtag. A hashtag is a word or short sequence of connected words preceded by a pound sign as in #hashtag. A hashtag is used as a searchable keyword on a topic, and because of that, they are really nothing more than short descriptors regarding something that someone has posted on a particular site. I thought what if I were to hashtag this organ design, and wrote out some of the attributes I thought it would have. Here is the list.

#shortcompass
#narrowscaled
#lowwindpressure
#accompanimental
#historicallyreferenced

I recognized this list as belonging to the first organ I wanted to independently build when I first opened my original workshop, and before I built three organs from that workshop for church use. A lot of that original organ design still exists in the form of archived computer files, and the screen capture above shows what I thought the design would originally look like.

The short exercise in hashtagging directed me back to a concept. One worth building again.