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.