Earlywood: Against Perfection, Precision or Accuracy

Publisher’s note: Good morning. Here we have this week’s Earlywood, a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it originally appeared in a magazine article. Or in a book. Or, in this case, a blog post from 2017. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We hope you enjoy it.

It’s difficult to argue against perfection in woodworking. That’s because the counterargument is something like: “You’re a hack and can’t get it right, and so you say that your imperfections are intentional.”

Or put another way, you can’t be too rich, too thin or have joinery that is too perfect.

Here’s how I think about perfection: We now have the technology to abolish time zones. Each person’s phone could be set to a perfect local time where noon is always perfect noon when the sun is right …