Your Assignment Is…

Our high school was under construction the entire time I attended and to spread about 2,400 students around the construction site, school officials introduced a kind of flex-time to our schedule. I began my day early but instead of leaving early, I took the opportunity to add a second section of Wood Shop. There were only a couple of students with such a passion for wood working, but our shop teacher responded in a unique way. He offered to teach us production woodworking techniques. This was a good deal for him, because he ran a cabinet shop and we would essentially be working for free, but it was a great opportunity for us to learn something beyond the typical shop project skills.

He taught us about making jigs and fixtures, to facilitate reproducible results and he introduced us to the concept that saving time was more valuable than saving material (in a wood shop). One of the last projects he gave us combined both goals. He was making several hundred sets of ladder treads for a company that marketed an escape ladder. The ladder was a series of oak treads, supported by rope. The treads were identical and easily produced by automated operations in our instructor’s shop, except for the top tread. The top tread was deeper, designed to hold the rest of the ladder slightly away from the wall. Since each ladder only needed one such tread, the economies of scale didn’t exist to automate its production – that became our job.

Our teacher could have simply taken advantage of the free labor, but he challenged us to devise a jig and a process to complete this task. The goal was to create several hundred identical treads. The treads were simple, a rounded rectangle of oak with four holes for the rope and a slightly rounded over edge on the top and bottom.

Our first attempt was a series of jigs for cutting, drilling and shaping the edges; rejected! Our second attempt reduced the number of jigs to two, one for cutting and shaping and one for drilling; also rejected. As he struggled with young men who just wanted to power up a machine and start making sawdust, our teacher removed us from the shop and took us into a drafting classroom. We began to analyze the problem, the goals and the options and we began to draw prototypes. Eventually, with his guidance, we stumbled on the solution show at the right: a single jig that served to guide the blank through the cutting and shaping process, precisely locating the holes at the same time. The jig also accommodated handles to safely move the blank through the operations. Armed with that jig, we banged those treads out in no time.

Despite operating a cabinet shop of my own for a brief period, I’ve never had a need for production woodworking techniques, but my employer frequently benefits from this lesson. My day job is in IT; systems design, development and information services. Ask any programmer about frameworks, class libraries or functions and you will hear about the same benefits provided by that jig. Ask anyone associated with Content or Records Management about the importance of templates and workflows, and you will hear an analogous story. Being exposed to a physical problem in high school set these concepts forever in my mind. Hearing this information in a lecture would have never made the same impression as planning and then actually making the treads, proving the concept with wood and tools. In the time our instructor spent teaching us how to approach a problem, he could have produced the treads many times over. He understood how the value of the lesson exceeded the result of the process. He also understood the value of making us work through the problem until we discovered the answer.