Making Watches? Never!

I may have mentioned this in previous posts but it bears repeating, as it's a life-altering concept. One time my brother and I were working on a project that certainly did not warrant the level of perfection that I (at that time) was requiring. He grabbed whatever it was out of my hands and said, "we ain't makin' watches!". The point being that watchmaking requires extreme attention to detail while many, many, many other things do not.

Here's a more recent example:

This old table was used and abused and left behind in our basement...

 
...but it has a solid frame and some excellent natural paint patterns, so....

...why not use the originally-elaborate top with folding leaves and....

 ...with some scrap oak, cut some strips to...

 ...span the misc. top boards and...

...fasten them down to...

...create a new top (this new top will not have folding leaves nor the associated moving parts and complexity - but retains and highlights its "distressed" appearance)...

Now, just to attach the top by...

...driving some long screws into the...

....frame. I carefully measured the spacing on the scraps that span and combine the top boards into one piece. Why? Because, in so doing, I eliminated unwieldy measurements to evenly distribute the top with respect to the base. In other words, the properly-spaced scraps dictated the position of the top on the base w/o additional measuring.

Prior to my brother's "we ain't makin' watches" lesson, this sort of project would have involved a complete dis-assembly, re-gluing and clamping of the joints in both the base and the top (then an overnight delay for the glue to set), stripping of paint, sanding, staining, varnish....you get the idea.

Under the "we ain't makin' watches" framework, this project took about 2 hours!

Check out that cracked paint! Rich people would stumble all over each other for a chance at this thing, were it in a fancy shop.

 The best part is that this project is complete and ready to use (and it didn't cost a single penny). If you have a propensity for hand-wringing over "the details", feel free to try the "we ain't makin' watches approach" - if you try it on a project that you've scrounged for free, then you've got nothing to lose (and productivity to gain).