Your measuring story reminds me of a carpenter I once worked with during my 
first job on a commercial site, an old hand who taught me endless time 
saving tricks with a string-line, but when we worked at measuring, the cut 
and installed stuff was never up to my draftsmanly standard of perfection.

(Coming in from architecture, I treated the building site like a big 
drafting table, and learned carpentry as we went along.   The contractor 
hired me even though he had a full crew because I could "Do Angles!" as he 
said.    "Can you Do Angles?!?!?", was his precise interview question, with 
Italian emphasis on the Do and the Angles.   I could read the architect's 
drawings and the job had a big angled wall the crew of former house-builders 
could not figure out how to lay it out or build.)

Anyway, since the "experienced" crew foreman would not listen to the kid 
from college, Ed, the quiet elder old hand, and I put ourselves together as 
a mini-crew at the south end of the floor deck while the macho foreman and 
his crew of hockey stars blasted away, building like crazy at the north end. 
Over and over they to tear out their angled walls because they were in the 
wrong spots, while Ed and I at the south end of the floor got all our stuff 
right the first time.   But, I was going nuts because of potentially 
progressive little 1/4" variations I could not explain, until I looked 
carefully at Ed's tape measure technique.   The sliding end of his tape was 
so worn with age that the slot in the tape allowed a good 1/4" variance 
between pushing or pulling when taking a measure.   Ed, knowing his tool, 
simply accounted for it by cutting on the left or right side of his pencil 
marks depending whether his measure had been taken with a pull or a push. 
He simply neglected to tell me and the problem came when we called numbers 
to each other, until I convinced him to buy a new tape.

cp in bc



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gabriel Orgrease" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 3:33 AM
Subject: Re: [BP] today


> [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> Somehow, I was particularly shaken by today being a >>Tuesday<<, although 
>> it was raining cats and dogs, instead of that bright bluer-than-blue sky. 
>> So I looked up the first posts from that day - deb bledsoe's was the 
>> initial one.  And note Drew Diaz's spot on predictions.  From September 
>> 12th to 19th there was a service outage, repaired (do I recall 
>> correctly?) by Dan Becker.  The 19th was the day of Pyrate's memorable 
>> post, also included.
> c,
>
> Due to rain took 3 hours to get to the work site yesterday. Along the way 
> considered it may not be the best day to drive into Manhattan. Remembered 
> the drive out on that day. Later in the morning achieved near total panic 
> simulation when realized that after a month of measuring and measuring and 
> all the walls being within 1/4" of perfect (the damned screw heads on the 
> steel studs threw us off) that the floor stones (the largest at 400 lbs., 
> 1.25" marble slabs at one time salvaged from the St. Regis) suddenly were 
> 2.5" short of meeting the walls. It took a few hours of feeling very ill 
> before we settled out a plan. Just enough spare stone salvaged from a 
> reconfigured footprint to make up the difference, we hope. I still have no 
> goddamned clue why the floor fell short of the walls. The joke earlier in 
> the project about our leaving our stone stretcher in Vermont did not seem 
> quite as funny the second time around. We are moving and replicating an 
> existing marble clad bathroom and I now suspect that our fatal error was 
> to assume that the original bathroom was squared -- the new bathroom 
> certainly is squared. One stone is 1/2 inch out of square in 3'... when 
> they laid the first bathroom with the salvaged stone they cut it to fit 
> the walls. Spent the adventure with son. It was good. At 10 pm got home to 
> find out our home insurance is canceled... they no longer insure within 1 
> mile of the coast.
>
> ][<en
>
> --
> To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
> uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
> <http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>
> 

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>