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My old boss in Tulsa made me cut a mortise 40 times before he let me touch a chisel
Back in 2011 I worked for a guy named Dale in Tulsa who ran a small cabinet shop off 11th street. First week on the job he handed me a chunk of poplar and told me to mark out a mortise, then he watched me poke at it with a 1/4 inch chisel for maybe two minutes before he took it out of my hand. He said I was rushing the layout and that the mark was everything, then he made me do the whole thing over again, 40 times, until my lines were dead on before I ever got to cut. I thought he was wasting my time, but three years later when I was framing a set of garage doors in Broken Arrow I could lay out a hinge in my head without a square. Now I see guys on job sites eyeballing everything with a pencil behind their ear and it shows in the gaps. Dale passed away in 2019 and I still have that first poplar board with all my bad marks on it hanging in my shop. Anyone else have an old timer who drilled the basics into them like that, or did you mostly learn by just jumping in?
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