Saturday, November 17, 2012

Tommy, can you see me?

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This is Tommy at Lowe’s, cutting shelves for our new bookcases.

Rather than depend on a tape measure, I took one of the shelves to make sure the new ones were cut to the right length.

Tommy cut nine shelves from three 8-foot-long boards. None of them were exactly the same length. He couldn’t seem to figure out how to compensate for the width of the saw blade so they were all slightly short, but no more than 3/8 of an inch, so they should all be usable.

Based on our experience with Lowe’s carpet installation, precision just isn’t their thing.

My longtime friend Lonnie Miller, who lives in Lafayette, Ind., offered this observation:

 

I ran into the same thing at Von Tobels on Earl Ave. Found two things the kids don't get trained to understand. First, the run-out, or wobble of the blade at high speed makes the real world cut wider than the width of the blade itself. Then the kids make the initial measurement with the blade cranked up way too high for the thickness of the material being cut which makes the cut even wider. The safe bet is to figure the actual cut to be twice+ the thickness of the saw blade.

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