An Obsession With Perfection

Engineering and probably Business students aswell as Demographers
somewhere along the line encounter The S Curve. Take an “S” and grab
the lower left and upper right end and begin pulling them apart
horizontally. If you pull them far enough apart you end up with a
straight line sloping upward from the lower end to the upper end.
Before that you start moving the tangent line to where the two curves
intersect, flattening the reverse curve towards a straight line.

What’s this have to do with woodworking?

Well - I’m after the proverbial Bang For The Buck relationship. In the
example below, you can see that initially, getting a little BANG doesn’t
require a lot of BUCKS. But as the BANG goes up the BUCKS start to go
up even faster. At some point on this “S” Curve the BUCKS required for
more BANG starts going up really quickly. To get that last 5% of the
desired BANG may cost 4000% more BUCKS.

I want this much BANG v

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0

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B | 0
A | O
N | 0
G | 0

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BUCKS TO GET THE BANG
(Time & Energy To Get The Desired Result)

So what does this have to do with woodworking?

Replace BUCKS with BUCKS plus time and energy.

You’ve got an idea for a piece -be it a turning or a piece of
furniture. How far along the S Curve are you willing to go before you
decide the piece is done?

I’m going to use some things I’ve recently been turning - small delicate
stuff for an example of my question of BANG vs BUCKS - or more
accurately - RESULTS vs TIME / ENERGY.

By working small, I could experiment with several techniques, woods and
a boat load of shapes and forms - without spending a lot of time and
effort on what might be a dead end. The techniques and shapes/forms
will work for “full sized” pieces so I can work out just about
everything at a small scale - except for “finishing”. It’s tricky to
get a fine surface on small things that have a lot of tight spaces that
are difficult to get to with sandpaper, let alone a film finish. And
small delicate things are hard to sand anyway since the slightest
pressure can either destroy crisp edges - or snap the piece in two.

So I can quickly turn interesting ideas, doing the shapes and learning
the techniques, but can’t get a near perfect finish. Were I to turn
these pieces “full scale” I could take the process all the way through
to a nice finish. BUT - that’d take a lot more wood, some hard to
acquire and somewhat pricey - and it’d take a LOT more time and effort.

And that got me thinking. Some turners seem obsessed with getting a
glass smooth finish on their pieces - even under magnification, not a
scratch is to be seen. But the time and effort to get to that point
seems a long ways from the creative - and fun part - of the turning and
out in the low bang for the buck end of the S curve.

Between a perfectly turned piece, with a perfect shape, including its
base and throat, in THE perfect wood, with the perfect glass smooth
finish - inside AND outside - and a cube of wood with a circle drawn on
each face (Gary Knox Bennett won a presitgious turning competition with
his submittal of the latter) there’s a lot of time and effort, to say
nothing of the skill required.

So my question is-

Given that there’s a Point of Diminishing Returns along the S Curve To
Perfection, how far along the curve are you normally willing to go? Is
turning a shape that’s close enough to what you had in mind enough to
“call it good” or will you chuck up another blank and try to get the
shape better? For a hollow form, how much time - and risk - are you
willing to take to get the wall thickness almost perfectly uniform, or
thinned to say 1/8th inch? How much time are you willing to spend to
develop a Final Finishing/Burnishing Cut technique that leaves a nice
smooth shiny surface which requires NO finishing at all? Are you
willing to sand to 1500 or even 6000 grit BEFORE applying the first of
many layers of finish, each sanded out to the Nth degree to arrive at a
finish that looks like it’s an inch thick - ie Car Show Paint Job
finish?

To put the question another way-

Is doing just enough, and a bit more, to convey the idea enough for you
to say “It’s Done”, -the rest is just grunt work
- or
do you want to go all the way to the Perfect Finish Line, regardless of
how much time and effort will be required to get there?


Personally, I really like a the look of a good French Polish on a piece
of furniture - with dewaxed shellac of course, perhaps in Garnet. I’ve
spent hours applying over a dozen french polished coats of shellac to
the top of a sharpening station cabinet -knowing full well it’ll get wet
and will get scratched. But there’s something about a broad flat
surface of wood that has a glass finish on it that appeals to me.
However, on turned wood, I prefer a sanded “close enough” (scratches not
visible unless you look real hard) and burnished with brown paper bag
paper finish. Maybe it’s because the broad flat surface of a table top
isn’t meant to be picked up and explored with your finger tips like a
turned piece begs youto do (at least to really nice pieces). There is a
very subtle feel to wood which I believe is lost when a finish, be it a
wax or a friction polish, is applied to it.

And to date, I’ve not turned anything that I didn’t think could be
modified to make it better. Sometimes that will lead to a “series” -
the Spinarettes and their Peg offspring being a recent example.

So where do you Draw The Line - and why? How Obsessed With Perfection
are YOU?

Charlie b