Venting here trying to lower my blood pressure. I have a friend who is very bright and comes up with some great ideas. He shared one of his ideas with me the other day and asked if I would help build some of these so he could put it on e ebay. We think a lot alike but I have considerably more experience using power tools and building things.
He advised me ahead of time that these things we were building had to be precision, I advised him that I could keep the precision to under 1/16 of an inch and thats about the best I could promise. I also advised him that if we were building 10 of these things we could simply match up parts that were the closest for best fits and this would likely give us precision better than 1/32 of an inch.
I requested that before he came over to send me an e email with exact inside or outside demensions, exact thicknesses of the materials we would be using and a drawing locating slots, holes etc.
My plan was to simply precut everything, do any processes to the parts I needed to do and then assemble. If any templates were needed I would make them in advance.
His reply, we can’t do it like that. I need more precision we can only do them one at a time.
My reply, if I do them in production I can give you more precision simply by matching parts.
He shows up with the wood and no plans. We end up spending 12 hours building 4 of thse things that I could have built 10 of in less than 6 hours. He insisted on measuring every part and then micro trimming it to fit. In the end they came out very nice but in my opinion not near as nice as they would have if done in a production mode.
The kicker where I kind of exploded on him was when I was helping him load up at the end of the day he commented that we needed to find a way to make them a little more precise!
Whose method do you think would give the best chance for precision?