Measure Twice, Cut Once
Measure Twice, Cut Once
Sometimes in life there are exact moments. Reasons for why we like certain foods or why we behave a certain way in certain situations are often murky and complicated. At age five we love tater tots, at forty we won’t desecrate our sense of taste with one. How did that change occur? But there are rare occasions when we know exactly why we like what we like and why we do what we do. For example, I know the exact time and the exact location when I became fascinated by history. 1953, Lake George, New York.
My father stopped the Nash in the village of Lake George in order for the family to stretch its legs, get a bite to eat from the A&W stand, and let the radiator in the Nash cool off before we climbed the Adirondack mountains into Tupper Lake, our vacation spot in the fifties and sixties.
We noticed that on a little rise overlooking the lake a group of men were busy with shovels and picks and winches and pulleys and other gear. My dad, always a curious fellow, walked up to one of the men dressed in overalls and sporting a Yankee baseball cap, and asked him what was going on.
“We are excavating Fort William Henry.” My mouth opened wide as I watched men hoisting a musket and then a skeleton from a well.
“Okay if my son and I stroll around?”
“Sure. As long as you don’t touch anything.” We strolled around a perimeter bounded by yellow tape and string. The walls had fallen but there were open trenches in which lay skeletons still draped in the uniforms of the British red coats.
Muskets and bayonets and remnants of eighteenth century dresses and tomahawks and powder horns lay scattered in every direction accompanied by yellow labels. I did not touch anything, but I was touched. It was the exact moment when, at the age of seven, I became obsessed with history. When we returned home from that Adirondack vacation, I took out every book I could find in the public library about the massacre of British troops at Fort William Henry, Rogers’ Rangers and the Battle on Snowshoes, the Marquis Montcalm, Fort Ticonderoga and everything else related to the French and Indian War. Once smitten by the history bug it is hard to be cured. Half the books waiting on my nightstand have to do with interpretations of the past.
Later in my seventh year my father surprised me. My dad, an expert electrician, was also skilled in other craftsmanships like plumbing and carpentry and auto mechanics. Any task that required adept hands and an imaginative eye he apparently mastered. So one day he presented me with a wooden fort, about two feet by one foot with sliding front doors and a parapet. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood are associated with my use of that toy fort to reenact the battle of Fort William Henry over and over again.
One of my grandsons, named after a Civil War hero, apparently has a penchant for reading history, and I thought I would stimulate that interest by building him a toy wooden fort, complete with parapets, gun emplacements, watchtower and cannon. But it would be a fort for the nineteenth century since my grandson had plenty of union and confederate plastic toy soldiers. I am the non-fictional Clark Griswold, taking on projects accomplished perfectly in my dreams but not executed so perfectly in reality…..not close to perfectly if truth be told. The problem is, essentially, that, unlike my father, nature replaced my fingers with thick oven mittens.
The first step involved creating some actionable blueprints, a design that was elaborate in concept but unfeasible in construction. This was difficult since I cannot draw to save my life. I also know the exact moment when I realized I had no artistic skill in the visual arts. This epiphany occurred when my fourth grade art teacher, examining one of my attempts to cut out the shape of a human form, blew up in frustration at my clumsy efforts, took away my safety scissors and assigned me the artistic task of cleaning up the scraps left over from the endeavors of my classmates.
When my children were small, they would occasionally enlist my drawing skill. “Daddy, draw me Bert and Ernie.”
“Christie, I really can’t draw.”
“Please, daddy, draw Bert and Ernie.”
I would take the crayon or pencil and paper, and, recalling the Sesame Street characters, do my best to outline their faces. Finished, I would hand my artistic endeavor to my daughter, who would look at what I had drawn, look back at me, and then back at the paper.
“Mom, would you draw Bert and Ernie for me?”
Still, ruler in hand, pencil gripped tightly between two fingers, tongue sticking out from the side of my mouth (a sign of intense concentration) confident in the redemptive powers of rubber erasers, I managed to sketch what seemed to me to be an accurate portrayal of Fort William Henry. Others might see it as a somewhat lopsided rectangle.
I cleared a space in the basement workbench, gathered some basic tools like chisels and hammers and screwdrivers and took off to shop for wood at Things Are Us. The megastore’s automatic doors slid open and before me were canyons of materials, a library of construction materials with shelves filled with wood and stone and plastic. A middle-aged man with his name stitched on his white pullover and sporting an orange tool apron approached me. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, um…” I glanced at his nameplate. “Yes. Harry. I am looking for some wood, maybe two by fours.”
“Certainly, all the wood supplies are in aisles six and seven. May I ask what you need the wood for?”
“Um….I am building a toy fort for my grandson.”
Harry’s eyes expanded, his eyebrows lifted. “Oh, that sounds interesting. Let me take you back to Theodore. He can help you.”
So I followed Harry who handed me off to a slightly younger man. I explained what my project was to Theodore.
“Oh, very good. Come with me.” And we strolled to the stacks of wood, two by fours, four by sixes, six by eights. Wood for framing houses, wood for bracing ceilings, wood for covering walls, wood for building arbors, pergolas, trellises and constructs I never knew existed. As we strolled down the canyons of machines and materials, I could feel a twitch in my chromosomal makeup, a slight tilting of my double helix.
Many people do not know about this, but most men, and, I suppose, many women, carry this specialized gene I call the machine gene. The machine gene is responsible for the yearning that men experience to purchase a tool that is incredibly enticing even though they will probably never use it, or, in some cases, have no idea what it is for. This gene usually switches on when one is strolling, as I was, through an area replete with gizmos with flashing lights and myriad dials and switches. I am certain early man strolling through the primordial swamp, was stricken by this same desire to pick up a rock and place it in his fur pocket believing that some day he would find a use for it.
I stopped to examine a plasma cutter which was on sale for under $3000 and an air compressor. I imagined a conversation trying to convince Polley that a welding machine would pay for itself in fifteen years despite the fact I knew of nothing we could weld nor could I come up with a good argument for an air compressor. We don’t have that many flat tires. My machine gene slid back into its slot on the helix twist.
Theodore advised, “I think you could get away with two by fours. What quality do you want?” I made that decision easily. I had just consulted my bank account.
So I picked out three two by fours about ten feet long each and a four by eight piece of presswood for the floor of the fort. Theodore helped me stack the wood on the dolly and as he escorted me to the cashier, Theodore began a harangue about teaching history.
“Yeah. Good thing you’re doing. Kids don’t know sh…t about history today. Kids ought to know about their country, where they came from. Instead teachers put them on their devices and let the kids play video games. I tell you, it’s a shame.”
In the sincere conviction that it is my duty as an educator to disavow people of misconceptions, I wanted to use Theodore’s tirade as a teachable moment. But I really wanted to get home and begin building my grandson’s fort and besides, Theodore had a hammer and a somewhat sharp looking tool in his apron, so I simply got in line.
When I opened the back of my car, I realized I was not going to squeeze the ten foot pieces of wood or the presswood sheet into the car. I spent a half hour or so but the math defeated me. So I returned to Theodore and asked him if he would please cut the pieces in three foot lengths which he was kind enough to do.
Materials in the basement, I followed my father’s advice. Measure twice, cut once. After seven cuts I still did not have the right size, the circular saw was shredding the wood so that splinters flew everywhere, and, in the tight confines of the cinderblock cellar, the sound of the saw was deafening. Not to mention the sawdust that clouded the air in the basement. I was breathing pine wood. No. For fort building I needed a finer cutting tool.
Back to Things are Us. Harry was still greeting visitors. “Yes, sir, back so soon?”
“Uh, huh. I think I need a saw to do some finer cutting.”
“Absolutely. Follow me.”
Ten minutes and fifty dollars later, I returned to the basement with a jig saw. Measured twice, cut only five times this attempt. I cut the presswood which would serve as the floor of the fort. My idea was to place one two foot 2X4 on top of another two foot 2X4 with a two inch piece of presswood to form the walkway for the upper story parapet. But before I could do that I had to cut out the gun sites in the walls. See below.
So, with oven mittens for hands, I made the cutouts using the jig saw. I noticed after all the cutting was done that I had created a great opportunity for my grandson to spend the next ten years of his life removing splinters from his fingers. I could hear his grandmother’s reprimands tearing off my flesh as she applied a quart of Neosporin to his wounds. I also realized it would take me a few years to sand down all the spots that needed to be sanded down. Back to Things Are Us.
Harry was in his accustomed spot. “Hi, Ralph. How is the fort going?” The customer behind me was impressed that Harry and I were on a first name basis. I explained my problem. Harry cradled his chin in his hand. “Have you heard of a Dremel?”
Forty minutes and thirty dollars later I was back in the basement reading about all the Dremel attachments.
In the Dremel kit were about fifteen little cylinders wrapped in sandpaper. I placed one on the Dremel and started sanding. Now we’re talking!!!! After five minutes half of the sharp edges were as smooth as 12 year old Scotch (which I could have used after inhaling all the dust). Suddenly the sand paper attachment flew off the Dremel and bounced off the naked light bulb above me and then off my left eyebrow. This became a common occurrence, and after I went through all fifteen sanding attachments, I figured it was time to stain each piece of wood.
On my painting shelf was a quart of walnut stain that I had used twenty years or so ago on a backyard picnic table. The picnic table had spent the last decade at the bottom of some landfill. As I pried open the can of walnut stain it was obvious from the way the paint stirrer stood straight up in the hardened liquid that the walnut stain should have accompanied the picnic table long ago.
“Hi, Harry.”
When I came home with a new can of walnut stain plus a few brushes, Polley greeted me at the front door. “Did you go to the store like that?”
“Like what?”
“Your head and your eyebrows are covered in dust. And there is a bruise over your left eyebrow.”
“Mere flesh wound.”
“I don’t care about the sawdust in your hair and all, but are you breathing in all that stuff?”
As if in a Merry Melodies cartoon, I coughed just at that moment, and after covering my mouth, I looked into my hand which was drenched with half of the back wall of the fort. “Maybe I should wear a mask.”
“Maybe?”
Masked Fort Builder Pre-Covid
My next challenge was to nail the presswood floor to the rectangular frame of the fort. I looked at the shelf in my basement that held nails….all kinds of nails. My father, using his G.I. bill, purchased a fixer-upper in suburban New Jersey. As his apprentice, one of my jobs was to remove the nails from the beams he took down, straighten them out so he could use them in the new beams he installed. This process figured heavily into my father’s building budget. I still had several jars of those nails, each of which was the size of the golden spike they used to join the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. I thought the nails might be a mite too large, and my suspicions were confirmed when the nail split the bottom wall in two. I would have to remake that wall and purchase finishing nails.
At Things are Us, I also picked up some craft wood furniture, barrels and tables and some thin sections of wood that I would stain and use to make ladders. I also picked up hinges and a small bell and other things one might find in an eighteenth century fort.
When I got to the front of the line Marjorie the Cashier said, “Hi, Ralph. Haven’t seen you in a couple of days. How’s the fort doing?”
On the ride home I thought about all the people who worked at Things Are Us, and how helpful they were. Did they acknowledge my dedication to this enterprise for my grandson, did they understand I was making the most of my construction inabilities, did they appreciate that in the last month I was probably responsible for half their paychecks?
I stained the barrels and the slats that would become the ladders. Then I tackled the doors. They had to be just short enough to swing open, and I needed a locking mechanism. Measured twice, cut four times. I was getting better. Doors, watchtower, parapets all completed and connected, I made the biggest mistake of the whole enterprise. I balanced the entire fort on an empty stain can so more air would circulate around the building and dry it off faster.
I was munching on a liverwurst and onion sandwich when I heard the crash. Three hours later, I had a fort with a twenty degree incline to the left. Christmas was less than a month away, and since it had taken me three months to get this far, restarting the project was a non-starter. My grandson would have to lean to his right.
I wanted to build cannons that actually fired cannonballs. It was surprising to find how many online videos there are to build actual miniature cannons that use real gunpowder. Despite trusting my grandson’s common sense and ethics, I discarded the idea of a real cannon and thus avoiding the possibility of setting fire to my daughter’s home.
I settled on the idea of cutting copper tubes, then mounting them on a caisson on wheels. A simple trip to Things Are Us, ten board feet of wood, the purchase of wooden balls for the projectiles and I figured I was in business. It is not that easy to line up axels and wheels. For me it took five days to build four cannons. All I had left to figure out was the firing mechanism. I tried a series of devices using rubber bands most of which either jettisoned a cannonball a half inch or snapped and inflicted damage on my nose. Then came a Eureka moment. Springs!!!
Online I had my choice of torsion springs, compression springs, extension springs, stock springs, spring anchors, all in different sizes. I was running out of time as the holidays approached, so I delayed paying my mortgage in order to purchase a variety of springs to fit my cannons. Another trip to Things Are Us and I had the right size screws for the plunger.
Cannon constructed, and with a Clark Griswold drumroll playing in my brain, I pushed the first cannonball down the mouth of the cannon. The drumroll quickly fizzled out. The cannonball was too large. Decision. Either sand all the cannonballs or return to Things Are Us. Marjorie was as cordial as ever.
Finally I thought the fort should have a flag. I downloaded an image of the American flag only realizing that the union did not have fifty states in the nineteenth century. I downloaded an appropriate flag and using some software miniaturized it. I spent several hours figuring out how to paste the two sides of the flag so that the flag appeared the same from both sides. Before I could get to doing the same thing with the Confederate flag, I ran out of cyan and yellow printer cartridges.
After an online search and fifty dollars withdrawn from my account, I was back in business, Stars and Stripes and Stars and Bars at the ready.
At the last minute it occurred to me that my daughter would appreciate not slipping and sliding on small cannonballs in her living room, so my last trip to Things Are Us involved purchasing a small box with sliding lid. I showed Harry and Theodore and Marjorie pictures of my finished project, and they were kind and ooh and aahed and thanked me for financing their holiday adventures.
As an educator I learned that students sometimes learn more from instructive play than from robotic work. I hope that my grandson enjoys the fort, and I hope it inspires him to view studying the past as a tool for understanding the present and predicting the future. I hope he is fortunate enough some day to build a fort for his grandchildren.