Well I Outsmarted Myself Again

[shoottx]

I was building a storage cabinet (and using it to work out the kinks in another project). It was 3/4 ply cut to size temporarily assembled with biscuits.

So I thought (here is where it get's dangerious) why not stain and paint it before final assembly. I did that experimenting with an ebony stain on the outside, and some excess blue paint for the inside. Or so I thought, When I started to reassemble the cabinet two of the panels (the top & back) were painted wrong. I was able to fix the problem by cutting in new biscuit slots.

But It was another example of out smarting myself. I had marked all the panels and then sanded off the markings.

So I din't feel like the only idiot here, how have you outsmarted yourself?

[Ed62]

Yeah, I made a mistake once. Maybe twice.

Ed

[RodKirby]

Oh - I've forgotten how many times

[Daryl]

The harder I look the less I see.

[Richard in Smithville]

I thought I made a mistake once, but I was mistaken.


Actually, if you don't count cutting to the wrong length, drilling in the wrong place, or forgetting that crucial part until after assembly, I usually do alright.

[jackellis]

Everything I've built has at least one dumb mistake. Most have several.

[Uncle Cracker]

I have never made a dumb mistake in my life. I have, however, made some incredibly intelligent mistakes...

[BobSch]

How about mis-adding lengths and ending up with a cabinet where one drawer could close completely but not the one on the opposite side. Hint: a 24" cabinet can't have two opposing drawers each with a 12" interior.

[TB Roye]

I only make one mistake a year. I am working on the year 2586

Tom

[jonmulzer]

I almost made a good one today. I went to pick up the MDF for the top of my new workbench. I was in a rush when leaving the house so I ran down to the workshop and measure the carcass. I was going to shoot for a 3" overhang on the front and sides. Measurements were 24"x51" so I thought to myself real quick that I needed two pieces of MDF to laminate together that are 27"x54". Wrong! When I was at the BORG it hit me that I was going for a roughly 5' workbench when I started this and that it seemed short, then I realized my mistake. This was as we were headed back to the panel saw. Two minutes later and I would have been SOL.

[Stytooner]

One of my most recent goofs has to do with nothing. Well, not really nothing, but the lack of nothing. Okay maybe just the symbol for nothing.

I was coding some Gcode to run on my mill. Cutting out a new style of splitters. I engrave the model number usually and the thickness of the steel plate I am using. I use a 90 degree pointed end mill for this.

Well, the depth of these engravings are usually .008" deep. Well, I coded these @ .08" deep. The mill cut it alright, but that is a big depth difference. That part was ruined quickly. This has happened 3 times is the worst part. Now when making new code, if I don't get anything else right on it, the Z depth is always correct.
One stinking zero is the difference between a good or bad part.

[BobSch]

One stinking zero is the difference between a good or bad part.

So you're saying that nothing matters?

[Uncle Cracker]

One stinking zero is the difference between a good or bad part.

...or a good or a bad paycheck...

[crokett]

One stinking zero is the difference between a good or bad part.

Or code that won't compile. When I was in college I learned COBOL. One morning I got to the lab to finish a program. Went to compile and it gave me syntax errors. I cleared up all but 1. 2 hrs later I am still trying to figure it out - I can change the variable name and it works but when I use the one required for the assignment it doesn't. A buddy comes over, looks at the screen and tells me to change '0' to 'O". On the VAX terminals we were using, they looked a lot alike.

[Uncle Cracker]

I feel your pain, David. In the early days of AutoLisp, one unpaired parenthesis could bring the whole process to a standstill. This is before there were neat little programs to run the code through to look for the stragglers. Debugging is so mind-numbingly tedious. How people do it for a living without taking an Uzi to their coworkers is a mystery to me...