Ever make what seems like an innocent building choice only to find out that the impact of that choice spreads and creates lots of unanticipated problems? Want to share your most memorable building mistakes? (a.k.a. opportunities for creative solutions)

I remember reading about the guy who used a 2x4 for a strongback. The 2x4 warped and he didn’t realize it until he was half finished stripping the hull. He ended up sawing out a section of the hull and straightened it out. He ended up stripping a bird into the new opening he made.

Sometimes in these situations I develop incredibly creative solutions to recover from mistakes. Most times in an effort to not re-do work I spend 2x the effort/time trying to recover until I finally get humility and redo the work. The trick is knowing when something is really a problem and needs to be redone.

Here is my latest goof. I haven’t heard of anyone else having this particular problem but wanted to share it with others in hopes that they won’t follow in my footsteps.

I Just lost a week recovering from what seemed like a reasonable choice.
In an effort to make my end forms a little stiffer I made them out of 3/4” MDF instead of 1/2” material. (My version of end form viagra.) I didn’t think that this would have any impact on the forms or stems. Wrong!!

If you have ever made internal stems you know that you cut off the thickness of your internal stems from your end form. You then laminate back up a stem of the same thickness which you bevel. I never really thought about the relationship of the thickness and bevel angle to the endform thickness. More importantly the geometry of the split sectional forms that you glue to the end forms gets screwed up if you don’t cut exactly ½” out of the middle of them. I cut ¾” out of the center. OOPS nothing lines up correctly.

Trying to recover, I spent a considerable amount of time beveling the end form and internal stem with a block plane and rasp. Knowing exactly where to cut and how much to take off so that the strips would lie fair proved elusive. In the end I surrendered and re-cut the sectional forms, endforms and laminated new stems.

Live and learn

Jack