[Jewelry making - Article 00986] - Re: [Orchid] CAD/CAM Milling Machines

[Marty]

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    Wise Blood's post on this subject reminded me, as so many of these
    posts do, of another  old adventure.  He wrote of receiving orders
    for bad designs and,  being unable to talk the designer into a
    rethink  -  finally just giving the customer what they want - a
    piece of #$%$!!! 

    Well, at least he had the opportunity and the good sense to confront
    the designer, and he gives it a try, so I suppose that is fair
    enough. Why should bull-headedness be rewarded with success? 

    When work is contracted out, somewhere along the line, before
    materials and time are committed to the project, somebody HAS to see
    the finished project as a WHOLE, preferably in a prototype, a scale
    model, or even a really good drawing. 

    Forgive me if I ramble on with one of my stories, not from the
    jewelry field, but on point anyway.  I can't help it if I haven't
    always been a metalworker. 

    About 30 years ago I was running my woodwork shop in the interior of
    British Columbia.  I took on a "rush" job to build window frames for
    a custom log house which was being built about an hour's drive north
    of my shop. The sashes (the part of the window which actually holds
    the glass and is mounted in the frame) had been contracted out to a
    shop in Vancouver and would be arriving later. The designer/builder
    gave me a set of specs which was simply some pages showing
    dimensioned drawings of a bunch of rectangles. Each of these
    described the size of a rough opening in the walls where a window was
    to fit. Each opening was numbered. My job was to build the frames to
    fit each opening and deliver them to the building site where the
    sashes would be waiting. There I would install the frames in the
    openings,  the sashes in the frames and, voila! the house would be
    warm and cozy against the approaching winter. 

    I built the frames as specified and delivered them on site.   It was
    the first time I'd seen the house. The designer/builder was justly
    proud.  It was a masterpiece of the log-builder's art. The logs were
    massive, beautifully fit together, cleanly finished and varnished.
    There were huge exposed trusses with excellent joinery. All in all,
    the massive scale and solidity of the house was perfectly suited to
    the owners. 

    Himself was a newly-retired Canadian Army tank commander, a colonel
    if I recall, and his wife was a veddy British lady. She had lots of
    fine antique furniture and porcelain tea services, all carefully
    piled under tarps in the damp, dark, concrete basement. There, in one
    corner, the colonel and his lady were gamely camped out while the
    building rose above them. The site was fairly remote, built in the
    woods off a steep old logging road. It was already October and the
    nights were frosty. "Worse things have happened at sea!" the colonel
    said, shrugging off the hardships. I was to hear that expression
    again in the following days.  As when, for example,  it turned out
    that the sashes did not arrive from Vancouver on time. ("Worse things
    have happened at sea!"). I set to work installing the frames. Each
    one was carried to the appropriately numbered opening and each one
    fit into its place like a dream. 

    Eventually the sashes did arrive, some weeks late.  Now it was
    November, and an early winter was setting in. I was called to come
    quickly and mount the sashes to their frames. The road up to the
    house site was starting to ice up. The colonel and his lady, still
    camping in the dark, fortress-like foundation were beginning to look
    a bit stressed. 

    I confronted the pile of sashes, about 40 or so, all neatly
    numbered, and I started to distribute them to their appropriate
    windows. Things started to look a bit odd. For example, the sash for
    a window on the north wall of a room might have, say, six large
    panes  ( 2 across and 3 high) while an identical sized window on the
    west wall of the same room might have a sash with 12 much smaller
    panes (3 across and 4 high).  Very odd indeed. At first I thought
    maybe the sashes had been mis-numbered and we started re-shuffling
    the deck, so to speak, trying to make sense of the muddle. That
    didn't work at all. I called the window shop in Vancouver and the
    foreman insisted he had built all the sashes as ordered. This was
    before faxes, emails, cell phones.  Communications generally were
    not as they are today  - but I finally got a copy of the order he
    worked from - which was a set of four drawings, each showing an
    elevation of the house; east, west, north, and south.   Each window
    showed little criss-cross lines roughly sketched in, indicating
    window panes in the windows, almost as a child might have drawn
    them. No further specs. The foreman had built the sashes exactly as
    they were sketched. I had enough sense not to ask, at that late
    date, who had drawn those sketches, the designer or the owners.  The
    shop foreman was, in his own mind, blameless,  pure as the driven
    snow - which was now starting to fall with some regularity.  

    The colonel said, "Worse things have happened at sea!"   It was too
    late to change the sashes. They'd have to go into the frames as they
    were. There were puddles of frozen water all over the "bedroom"
    floor, despite  the endlessly roaring oil space heater which filled
    the house with diesel fumes. The old tank commander might have felt
    right at home in that atmosphere but his lady's stiff upper lip was
    starting to quiver. It was bitterly cold indoors or out. 

    The windows were casements, which means that the sashes are meant to
    open by swinging outwards. Now we discovered another design element
    which had not been anticipated by the builder. He had wisely
    designed a very steep roof to shed the abundant snows of our region.
     Consequently, the eaves overhung the side walls in such a manner
    that the windows on those walls could not swing out without striking
    the underside of the overhang.  Whoops! Well, there were always the
    end walls - but no!  The builder had displayed his excellent joinery
    by including huge exposed log trusses under the gable ends of the
    roof.  The horizontal members of these trusses passed directly in
    front of the windows on the end walls so they could not open any
    better than the windows on the side walls.  

    The colonel and his lady must have had words with each other and
    with their designer/builder but all I ever heard was the usual
    "Worse things have happened at sea." 

    Perhaps with better justification than the sash shop foreman,  I
    felt that I had done my job properly, and I collected my fee in good
    conscience.  I had a family to support. Nevertheless I felt very
    badly for those two half-frozen backwoods pioneers when I left them
    in their dream house full of mis-matched windows that wouldn't open.
     There was a bit of "good news" to the story. Their lonely location
    insured that not many people (other than themselves) would actually
    see the silly-looking windows.  And the weather insured that it
    would be many months before they would ever want to open any of the
    windows. 

    Again, I extend my apologies for straying so far afield but I think
    I have learned from that experience to ask an awful lot of questions
    when somebody asks me to build something out of context.  What is it
    for?  Who is it for? What does it have to fit next to?  What do you
    want it to do? How do you want it to work ?   I don't ever want to
    take money again for a bad job, no matter who is to blame.  

    And I do have the colonel's words to cheer me when things go wrong. 
    "Worse things have happened at sea."   Like the Titanic. 

    Marty in Victoria,  where the weather is better than I really ought
    to tell folks about.

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