Woodworking Lesson Learned

Over the past few months, I have come to the following conclusion about woodworking...

Rule 1: Creating parts with straight, flush angles is 50% of the craft. If you can not cut boards with precision, you cannot create quality work.

You must be able to cut a board's length square to its width, while keeping the side square to the face. Likewise, you must be able to cut a board's width square to its length, and make its faces square to its sides, etc. This all sounds quite trivial, until you try to do it. If your tools are of poor quality, you will find it is nearly impossible to keep the tool calibrated long enough to make a clean, square, or correctly angled, cut.

If you cannot calibrate your tools to the proper levels of precision, or it takes you 10... 20... 30 minutes to do so, you will probably never find pleasure in this art, because you will be wasting all of your time trying to make proper cuts, and wasting wood, instead of actually building something.