A lucky mistake

Too often, making a serious mistake in a project or commission means dropping back and starting over again. If you’re a hobbyist, that’ll cost you all the time you’ve already wasted. If you’re a pro, that costs you time and money. 

What kind of mistakes am I talking about? Things like cutting on the wrong side of a cut line, mixing up components in the wrong places and not realizing it till the glue’s dry, or routing dados or rabbets too deep. 

Also, cutting the miter for a frame component backward. Like below: 

When I do a lid frame that will take an inset panel, I always cut the rabbet joint on the entire length of the workpiece before cutting the frame parts to length. One continuous pass over the router bit is much easier — and safer — than routing four individual shorter workpieces. Then, once routed, I cut the long workpiece to length with miter cuts to get my four frame components. Done it a hundred times. 

But you can see in the above photo that I cut the miters for one workpiece going the wrong way, putting the rabbet on the outside of the frame. Nice going, knucklehead. Nothing to do but pitch that component and make a new one. Hopefully, the wood I use will match. 

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about that: I had no more cherry in the shop. I didn’t really have time to go wood shopping, so I started thinking of ways to salvage it. Maybe decrease the size of the box, which means I could make the frame smaller and simply trim that rabbet off. No good; the box has to remain the same size. 

After thinking on it, it occurred to me that instead of getting rid of that errant rabbet, I could rout identical rabbets on the outside of the other three components and add some complementary walnut trim into it. The effect would be a dividing ring around the box at the lid opening and, luckily, exactly the touch I didn’t realize the box was missing. The walnut trim turned out looking great.   

Just like I planned it all along.