A Headboard and the Dog's Dinner

 A Headboard and the Dog’s Dinner

By Bobby Neal Winters

I believe in capitalism, but we need to be careful.  The purpose of our country should not be to make money: rather it should be to make good people. The details on how to do this are kind of vague at this point, so let me talk about something that I am learning about instead.

I am making a headboard for our bed.  By our bed, I mean the one that belongs to my wife and me.  We have a king size bed and have been using the same headboard for the last 32 years.  It is a pretty headboard, but it is not useful. There are people like that, but I digress.

When I first envisioned the headboard in my brain, it was all in one piece. There was a way that it looked, and it was beautiful.  When I began to think through how to build it, it changed.  To build something that large and make it all “one piece” would require a different sort of building set-up than I have. 

I am still a beginner, and I don’t have a large collection of tools--though my wife might debate me on this.  I am learning through projects, and it is through these projects that we acquire the tools. The game is to get the absolute minimum of new tools that you need for the project at hand.

This is a dynamic process which means that you may have to modify the project as you go along.

Because of my limitations, I had to modify my vision so something I could do in pieces.  This happened a couple of times.  The first step was the decision to make the headboard in three pieces: One tier of a bookshelf along the top and two cupboards to support the bookshelf, one on each end.

During the process, this changed as well.  The bookshelf piece was to be six feet long. That would’ve created possibly insurmountable issues when it came time to glue and clamp, so I decided to make that six-foot bookshelf into two three-foot bookshelves attached in the middle.

When something is broken-down into pieces, you can then concentrate on making each piece the best it can be.  Think about it as a thing in itself while always having in mind that it is going to have to fit into something larger.  This is a balancing act.

In making one of the cabinets to be used as a stanchion, I framed it so as to make it stronger. (And also to make it look less like something a redneck just threw together.) In doing so, the top of the frame stood out a bit proud of the top.  That would be okay were it to be a stand-alone piece, but it may cause problems when I am trying to attach all of the pieces together.

I’ve got a Japanese flush saw which I inherited from my wife’s dad that will come in handy should I decide to make that proud board even with the rest.

Each piece when looked at unto itself is a box.  The cabinet stanchions are boxes that are made of plywood.  I’ve glued four pieces of wood together carefully with dowel pegs.  I’ve put frames around the open ends.  They are four pieces of wood put together with glue and pocket-hole screws. The frames are then glued to the cabinet.

Care is taken with each board; care is taken with each box; care is taken in putting the boxes together.

And it still might all look like the dog’s dinner when you are done.

It strikes me that a large part of the discipline of woodworking is learning techniques to de-dogs-dinnerify whatever mistakes you make along the way.  Hence the existence of the Japanese flush saw.  Even the skilled Japanese make mistakes.

At this point, I am still working on the headboard.  I can be finished sooner or later depending upon how persnickety I decide to be. On one hand, I can create something quite functional in a comparatively short time. On the other hand, if I worry too much about what my grandkids think of me when they look at it after I am dead, it might take rather longer.

But that is an advantage to making things in pieces. I can design it so I can come back later to fix each of the pieces after I am better at this.

Maybe we can make a better country by making better people. Maybe we can work on fixing the parts of our culture that look like the dog's dinner, piece by piece, a little at a time.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )