After years of making and fixing mistakes in my work, I have drilled the following routine into my head. I almost never deviate from it, and it has served me well.
If your repairs are less than satisfactory at times, there might be something here you can use.
So I made a mistake today and drilled two mortises in the seriously wrong places.
Step 1: Stop everything. Really. I don’t finish the operation. I don’t try to fix the mistake. I don’t do any woodworking. Stop. I put down the tools and walk away.
Step 2: Sit down at the laptop and write a nice note to my wife and kids. I do something for a few minutes that breaks the self-loathing and blame and shame. There is a good fix out there. But I am in no shape to make it.
Step 3: Clean up the mess I was making when I made the mistake. Put the extra tools away. This forces me to delay trying a quick repair. There are always multiple ways to fix a mistake. Your first instinct isn’t always the best. My gut response to my mistake above was to glue some offcuts of a stick in the holes. That was not the best approach.
Step 4: Stare at the mistake. Sometimes I’ll lay out what I should have done to the work – here I drew in the correct mortises. Then I measure everything and try to figure out what I did wrong. How did this happen? Again, this is not to beat myself up. It is a delaying tactic to get my brain working on multiple solutions.
Step 5: If an ideal repair doesn’t occur to me, I will walk away for a day (if the project permits it). Honestly, steps two through five are me just stalling as much as possible. There is an elegant repair out there. I just need to allow it to bubble to the surface.
Step 6: When I make the repair, I do it deliberately and while I’m alone in the shop. I try to do everything in slow motion. Triple-check things I would normally double-check. I remembered I had a plug cutter in a drawer that would cut perfect face-grain plugs to fill the mortises. And I had color- and grain-matched scraps in the scrap bin. The plug cutter didn’t make a tapered plug (unfortunately), but it will be good enough to be undetectable under paint.
This repair will come out fine. It set me back a couple hours, but the chair is going to look fine. It will be just as strong. And it’s an error I will forget in a few months.
— Christopher Schwarz
p.s. I’ll show the completed repair on Instagram sometime soon – I can’t level the surface until the glue is completely dry.
“Remediation” has been a big part of my job over the years. A lesson we try to drill into people is you shouldn’t fix until you understand what went wrong and how it happened. Your step 4 is similar to that. I know for me, saying “That was dumb, I won’t do it again” and continuing on makes it very likely I will do it again. But stopping, as you do in step 4, and really understanding what it is I shouldn’t do again ensures that I don’t do it again.
‘Anyone who never made mistakes never made anything’ so said my patron saint as I must have made lots of stuff given the number of mistakes I have made.
It took me a few years to finally realize that I don’t have to show the mistake to the client. Everything I do is just the way I wanted it!
Great advice! Sometimes stopping helps to speed things up…later!
Thank you for sharing mistakes . Not often share and I miss that part from woodworkers I follow. I feel less incompetent…
Copyright violation! You stole my thoughts! I occasionally teach woodworking and the first thing that I talk about is the fact that every one of us makes mistakes; the difference between a good woodworker and an ok woodworker is how well we fix them. And the first step to fixing a mistake is to do nothing; just walk away!
Same thing my grandfather said to me is to walk away,go do something else
Working in high school and college with an old time carpenter who built the house, cabinets, did everything he told me more than once – ‘the difference between a good carpenter and a bad one is your ability to hide a mistake’. 60 years later – and having assisted him in building the last house he did, which we have lived in for 44 years – I’m still following what he taught me. Clarence would call you a good chair maker.
Chris, thank you so much for this — I needed to read this. Especially #1 and #2.
Another item that I have learned over the past few weeks:
Don’t wait until December and expect to churn out perfect gifts for everyone on your list at the last minute.
Your mistakes will compound, frustration and depression will set in, and it really won’t we be as enjoyable as it should be.
My rule for 2023: Start making gifts in January, and if you don’t have a piece finished for someone by Thanksgiving, you’ll have 4 weeks to work on Plan B.
if you need fast and easy gifts, check out (Holiday Spatulas) right here. just search the Lost Art blog.
Really, really good advice. Thanks for sharing it.
In 1973 I was an icebreaker as a woman in the traditionally male office equipment repair business and the stereotype default description of males was macho. I was more than a little surprised that a lot of the “soft skills” training was about being what today we would call “self-aware”, how are you feeling about what’s going on. The instructors were adamant about when things start going south, get off the customers premises! Go get a cup of coffee , get a part, get a manual, but GET OUT! When you are by yourself on electrically powered machines with often no one handy you cannot afford mistakes from frustration.
What is true for how people work remains true in all endeavors. I quickly learned as a young adult that people are so impressed that you actually made something (a dinner or an outfit) that unless the vegetables are burned to charcoal they will never notice something that wasn’t what you planned.
I’ve given that last advice to more than one person planning a wedding (or other performance). “The audience is looking for what worked well, not what went wrong, and (unless you make the mistake of printing a detailed program) they are unlikely to complain about any last-minute changes unless you call attention to them. If you hit the wrong note and it sounds good, it’s harmony. If you hit the wrong note and it sounds odd, it’s jazz. Either way, don’t let it throw you; they’ll probably forget that detail in a moment anyway… Or if they do remember it, they’ll forgive you for being human. Correct if necessary, without calling attention to it, and move on. Whatever happens may not be perfect but it will be good.”
Now if I could just take my own advice more often.
Very encouraging words, thank you! We all make mistakes.
“There is no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse.”
-Astronaut Chris Hadfield
When I was in flight school I was taught that Step 1 of any aircraft emergency is to “wind your watch”. This is the same concept as steps 1 and 2 above, with its intent being to prevent “fast hands in the cockpit” and doing something to compound the emergency (i.e. shutting down the wrong engine in flight)…or in this case to prevent attempting a hasty and ill-advised repair. Thank you for your sage advice!
This is the same strategy I always employed with computer problems when I was working as a tech. Woodworking problems won’t often get worse when you walk away from them for a while. Doing something different allows your brain a chance to do some problem-solving in the background. Sleep can help too.
I remember one time, many years ago, when I, too, made a mistake.
In step 1 you forgot to add ” Limit your cuss to words to 3 or 4″ as you walk away.
On my first chair a couple years ago, I drilled the back legs twice the first time I didn’t have enough rake. I cut them off set up my bevel redrilled them reemed the holes glued in the legs still not enough rake. now if you set in the chair and lean back at all, over you go. I think the only way to fix it is to make a rocker out of it. just think I may have stated a new trend Stick chair rocker.
Thank you for sharing! Your process is not all that different from my own. An old mentor taught me that there is no mistake that cannot be repaired. Once I took that message to heart, I learned not to panic and rush the fix. In fact, I learned to turn fixes into a personal challenge.
I really love this piece. Great for me as a woodworker and great for me as a human being. I f life gave me a do-over, this would be near the top of my guiding principles.
Oh captain my captain.
Here’s what I love… you write these at the exact same time things like this happen to me. I made a mistake on a chair and I’m debating making a whole new seat or fixing what I have. I will try to plug the holes that aren’t at the correct angel and see how it looks. Thank you.
Thanks Chris for codifying the steps. I had found walking away from it and doing nothing for a while helps as well. The only true high pucker factor is during a glue up where the clock is ticking; I guess that’s one more reason to use liquid hide glue that has longer open time (really saved my butt on one occasion, where despite clearly labeling pieces I put something in backwards and only discovered 15ish min later and needed to remove and reassemble).
Me too. Thanks!
Is this error, by any chance, in the Gibson chair you are making for the how-tovideo? Would be kind of cool in a video like that to see the maker have a mistake and then fix it. And when is that Gibson chair video coming out, anyway? I’m holding off on the next project so I can follow along and make one.
I’m all in on any advice on making a Gibson chair. If there’s a sneak peak of a video Chris refers to or even a blog – other than Chris’ (I’ve read it a ton), I would appreciate it.
Christopher: Wow! this post really resonated with me. A few days ago I made a huge mistake. I am building a bench a la ” The Anarchist Work Bench”. I bored the hole for the leg vice 3 1/2 inches to low. I measured from the shoulder of the leg tenon and didn’t allow for the bench top thickness. I couldn’t believe what I had done. Was I no longer capable of using numbers on a rule? Could I remember my granddaughters name? I checked in with myself and yes, I could. I had not gone insane. As you stated, my first react was to immediately make a repair. But I didn’t. I took a deep breath and walked away. I went back the next day with a clear head. I could hear my father saying “You’ve got to know how to fix your mistakes. One of the things he taught me were that all mistakes can be repaired and that there are most likely two or three possibilities.
My dad used to say, “the mark of a good craftsman (and he would de-gender that if he was alive today because that was the kind of guy he was)…
is how he fixes his mistakes.
I had that today, drilled a hole into ingrain that wandered a bit and then wasted time messing about with trying to straighten it for the peg it was to receive. After wasting time and wallowing out the hole so it sort of worked I did what I should have done in the first place and cut off the post to a fresh end and drilled it again. I didn’t time it but I am pretty sure it took about a quarter of the time to retrace my steps and repeat to make it good then mess about with something not up to scratch. I took solace in having made sure there was plenty of spare material which enabled me to do this and my mother in law got another chunk of firewood for next winter.
Rub dirt in it and drive on! (As the Infantry would say.)
Figure out what you have done wrong (and why, if possible), and then devise a solution to the problem, and fix it.
In other words, what Chris said so elegantly.