The Blessing and Curse of Precision

During a recent garage chat with a friend about tools, I finally talked myself into purchasing a Milwaukee M12 right-angle die grinder. It's a great upgrade to my current shop: I really enjoy the handiness of a die grinder with Roloc discs for cleaning and the small amount of fabrication that pops up in my projects, but I am too cheap to make space or budget for the air compressor it would take to run hungry tools like a die grinder. While air tools absolutely have their place-I'll still make trips over to a friend's shop to do the next porting job-this little battery-powered tool has been a wonderful stopgap. Compromise when understood and expected rarely feels like such.

Adding this die grinder to my tool set forced me to rearrange a few drawers in my toolbox. In them I found the evolution of my capability to cut, sand, and grind: a set of mismatched files from an estate sale, bent and scraggly wire brushes, wire-wheel attachments for a drill, a corded angle grinder, a cordless angle grinder, and now a tidy little die grinder-all added in that order.

At some point, as you develop the skills to use the tools you have, a set of cascading switches trip in your brain. You want to do the job a little cleaner next time, or for the components to fit up better-in short, you want less evidence that a repair was done at all. When rebuilding my 1989 Honda XR250R during the year that I raced it, I took an odd amount of care to make it appear as though I hadn't taken the thing apart seven times in as many months. Keeping hardware from rounding off doesn't really require some crazy amount of care, but we have likely all been under a hood where the last person there certainly didn't take the time.

The evolution of my toolbox's contents happened incrementally rather than in big steps. Over 15 years passed between my first project car and when I bought a set of digital calipers. For a good number of years I worked with a single hammer, basic socket set, and some screw drivers; I did full motorcycle rebuilds with not much more. The most noticeable changes were not those in tool count but in quality: Tools that allowed me to perform more delicate work.

Each addition improved my ability to remove or address flaws or problems with increasing power and speed-and most importantly, with increasing precision. I could focus more and more on the process of creating a higher-quality finished product. I used my time more efficiently because the tool was helping me, not holding me back. Rather than putting a ceiling on my capability, the right tools enabled the more advanced ideas and plans in my brain to come to reality.

If you can measure something, you can usually perfect it. Years ago a tape measure was appropriate for the work I did; now, the projects on my bench require the ability to read a Vernier scale on a micrometer. While it is possible to work on vintage machines without being slowly strung out to a line of atoms entering the black hole that is true precision, there will always be a ceiling to what you can do with basic tools. It is possible to assembling an engine that lasts a long time using only rusty tools you found on the side of the highway; but that rebuild will involve a lot of luck.

Anything worth doing requires some level of effort and carries at least a little risk. The strange thing is that measuring is the most likely place for human error to enter and wreak havoc on your project. Transposing a few numbers in my head led to throwing out a couple chunks of aluminum and about an hour of work last time I was standing in front of a lathe.

Working on projects can be frustrating for any number of reasons, but occasionally that frustration reflects a standard of quality we happily imposed upon ourselves. Working on project cars is like running on a treadmill. It is possible to quantify how far you have come by the hours spent, the distance traveled, or the average pace per mile, and measuring and quantifying that progress made can be rewarding at the right times; but so often we forget to look back at how we have improved-and how much smarter we've become along the way. After all, now I can measure my project progress down to the thousandth of an inch.

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