Short Mistakes
The best part about making things by hand is that you get to carefully consider how you want to approach your materials, your tools, and your process. You can add your intelligence and your insight along the way to produce an object that simply couldn’t exist without your hand in the making. Or as Steve Jobs put it you can try “to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.“
The flip side is that you can also add your inexperience and your miscalculations and end up with a mistake. When the hand and the brain are connected in the making of things, it can be a blessing or a curse.
I picked up the fork that I had just built the day before. It was my first unicrown fork. I cleaned it up and admired it from all angles. It looked good! And then I discovered that it was shorter than I had designed it to be. I soon saw my error, and realized what I need to do differently. But there is no getting around it, the fork I was so proud of turned out to be a dud.
The generous view is that making mistakes is part of the learning process. And it is commonly said that the best craftspeople are the ones who are continually learning. These twin platitudes are a shallow consolation when I need to both learn and produce on a tight timeline. I don’t have a lot of time to be messing around building lovely but too-short forks.
The less generous, brutally pragmatic view is that I could have sourced a fork from a supplier that has nearly identical specifications, from the rake, to the span, to every last braze-on. It would have been less expensive to buy that complete fork than to pay for my materials and paint costs, let alone my time. Let alone twice. But I wanted to build it. I wanted to build it because I had the opportunity to learn something new. I also was convinced I could build a fork that was more beautiful than the one I could buy, despite having never done so.
So, I will go out into the shop early tomorrow morning and buckle down until I have my second ever unicrown fork. What will be visible in the finished product? Refinement or beauty? Maybe, maybe not. But it will be the fork that simply wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t built the first one. That will be good enough.
I had a luthier friend who’d been building for 20+ years. His waitlist was three years and growing. He told me that the longer he practiced, the more aware he was that he could get to some critical gluing stage late in the build and, in one move, screw up thousands of dollars worth of rare, beautiful wood and untold dozens of hours of work. He said that was his favorite part about building, walking that tightrope, keeping that alertness. He made building out to be a spiritual path, in which he gets personally refined just as much as do his skills.
That’s a really neat way to think about it. I am actually in the middle of a process right now that I decided to elimate risk from: installing couplers. In the past I have built a frame and then chopped it in two, removing just the right amount of material. Like your friend, no room for error. While I can get into that super focused space for the operation, I decided this time to install the couplers in the tubes before building the bike.
Less of a tightrope this way, but I have enough tightropes :)