I have been saving for a bandsaw and dust collection. As a hand tool woodworker (just my personal preference as I really want to work with my hands), it's the one tool that I think will be really helpful. It is a huge pain to reduce stock thicknesses by hand. To the point, where I have made things more thick that I would like.
I have find myself falling into a trap I first encountered 15 years ago in another hobby upgrading equipment. What is the best? Though a natural question to ask, it is one the leads to much frustration as so I was discovering then and am experiencing now. I suddenly remembered reading a book called Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz that discusses this in detail.
By searching hard for "the best" we are setting ourselves up for feeling unhappy with whatever we choose. The better question is "what is a good choice?" In doing so, we relieve ourselves of the mental burden reading all that has been written and reviewed. It's relatively easy to find good choices; hard to find the best.
Rediscovering this has helped greatly. As such, I've been more quickly able to narrow what bandsaw I will likely get as well as which dust collector. All I need to do is now find a good band saw and good dust collection; not the best of each. If you haven't read the book, it's well worth getting and can probably be found used. It will likely save you lots of agony over woodworking equipment as well as other things in life.
The best bandsaw is the one that's in your shop and helping you do work. Kinda like what my grad school advisor told me many years ago: "The best thesis is a finished thesis."
ReplyDeleteHi Brian,
DeleteI totally agree with that on two fronts. Assuming I didn't buy a piece of junk, what whatever is in the shop and works makes me happy. Of course, from time to time I will buy different things just to explore and try things out but so far I haven't been blow away with anything new relative to what I had that did the same job.
As for thesis. I totally agree with you that the best thesis is a finished one. I know a lot of folks who did all the work for a Ph.D. in the lab which is 4 to 5 years of 60+ hours a week of work and then did NOT write it up. How hard can the write up be?!? Well, based on what I have seen, there is a significant double digit percentage who get that far and have finished the work (at a level that is worthy and good enough to be a Ph.D.) and just don't get it written. It's very sad in my opinion. But then again, I think part of what I Ph.D. program shows is that you have the grit to get through and do what is necessary. You probably are intelligent as well and know how to do research as well. I've had long conversations over the years with lots of friends on this topic. Every Ph.D. topic given to you to research is usually half baked and needs you to really dig into it to make it something decent. Those that have the grit and determination get it done. My two cents. Tonight I connect with a friend who is getter her Ph.D. in education. She's been working full time and taking full loads as well for the better part of 4 or 5 years. All she needs to do now is write it. When I spoke to her 6 months ago, she was stalled on the writing. I hope she has the grit to get it done.
Was thinking as I sent this, what does this have to do with woodworking? Well, as we work on a project, at some point often the project seems in our minds to go sideways and the temptation to take an axe to it and make firewood crops up. At least it does in me. Often the problems in the project are more in our mind than the actual work. Oh, don't get me wrong, we often have things we need to fix and they might be somewhat visible to the trained eye. However, if we have the grit to just push through and finish it, it will often look pretty good when done. Early, I would look horrified as I was half way through cutting a housing dado. It looked horrific. I wanted to stop. I didn't. When the joint was done, it looked decent. That extends to other things and errors we have. Well, between the above reply and this one, I could have written another blog post. If you see a future posting on grit you will know where it came from. Thanks Brian.
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ReplyDeleteThank you. Sorry for the delay in my reply. I get so few comments to my posts that I forget to check for them.
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