During a recent Shop Night Live, Tom McLaughlin quoted Jere Osgood (1936-2023) as saying “A straight line is a missed opportunity" to create visual interest in a design. True though that may be, straight, flat surfaces are a woodworker’s friends when it comes to joinery. When you move from design to creation, cut the joinery before making the curves. Even if the curves are the dominant feature, the joints come first.

To cite a simple example, consider a table with turned legs. It might be tempting to shape the leg first and then figure out how to support it while drilling or chopping mortises, but one would soon discover that it’s easier, more accurate, and safer to work out the joinery when the work piece can be secured flat to the bench, drill press, mortising machine etc. This applies all the more so to cabriole and other curvy styles. One big challenge in chair-making is that it’s often necessary to use a specialized jig to hold a turned part so that you can drill a round mortise (aka a hole) to receive a stretcher.

Thinking through the order of operations is imperative in the shop. For some operations, you probably already have well-established routines, as when preparing stock or sanding parts beginning with coarse grits and progressing through finer grits. Similar logic holds for applying finishes. If you perform a task often enough, you don’t want to be figuring out the order of operations each time. It’s far better to have a tried-and-true sequence of steps so that you don’t paint yourself into a corner, so to speak.

At some point in learning secondary-school algebra, we learned about “order of operations”. Remember learning how to tackle an expression like 6 + 2 x (5 – 2)²? Close your eyes and you might hear your middle school math teacher’s voice instructing you. You had to overcome years of training about proceeding left to right and learn a new set of priorities.

Airline crews and astronauts have detailed pre-flight checklists, athletes have pre-game warm-ups, orchestras have a well-established sequence to tune up before a concert. Surgical teams follow a Universal Protocol, including a Time Out, before every operation. The participants don’t invent or improvise the drills in the moment. There may be leeway to deviate or modify the steps well before “game time”, but never immediately before the main event.

Fun fact (I believe; please correct me if I’m wrong). Traditionally, tuning begins with an oboe playing a concert A (440 Hertz); according to the Rockford Symphony Orchestra website, “the bright, rather penetrating sound of the oboe was easy to hear, and its pitch was more stable than gut strings.” Other stable instruments like woodwinds and brass come next, followed by lower then upper strings, whose tuning is least stable. A cellist friend once explained to me that his cello could drift out of tune on the short walk from a backstage green room to his assigned seat on-stage.

In all of the above examples, the starting point is chosen for reasons of logic, technical requirement of the equipment and environment, safety, etc. Generally speaking, there’s too much at stake to simply dive in without forethought. Careful preparation may not have been invented in a woodshop, but the habits of mind that we develop as woodworkers turn up in many domains. First things first!