Checkering… She’s a cruel mistress.
A heartless vixen, intolerant of any haste, impatience or lapse of attention.
She can make you proud, but step out of line just briefly and she’s there to slap you back into place. Kick you in the groin, humiliate you.
Like aviation, checkering is not particularly difficult, but it is very unforgiving of mistakes.
Case in point, this project. It should have been a pretty simple job to extent the pattern I had started to fill in the rows mowed down in the recontouring process. I carefully redrew the border, then cut it with my veiner. I laid out some rough lines in pencil to keep me honest, then went to work. Although it looks below like I may have set myself up for failure with the veering line on the left side, I think the wrap-around distorts the actual contour of the line. I can’t blame anything I did on the lay-out.
The end result on the left side is quite nice as you can see below. I have a little more work to even up the depth of the cuts and bring the diamonds up to a point, but overall I’m quite pleased. This was the second side I did…
On the right side I got cocky. (did I mention she’s a cruel mistress?) Having done this before, (a little…) and having a similar wrap-around pattern on the grip area of project #2 about 90% complete in 24 LPI, I was fairly flying along with my 20 LPI three line cutter.
This will be done in time to catch a bowl game this afternoon I thought. (did I mention that she’s intolerant of haste?)
Then I noticed my lines starting to wander. A better man than I would have stopped and fixed things right there. I’ll just lean back the other way a little on the next few rows and get things back on track I thought. It didn’t work so well…
After several more rows thing just got worse. The lines were going in the right direction, but old versus new didn’t line up. Just like the cartoon where the rails for the first meeting of the intercontinental railroad are offset by one track width.
A better man might still have fixed it there, and I tried with my joiner, but alas it was too late.
I should have just accepted it the way it was and kept on. Maybe when the rows going the other way are laid in it won’t be so obvious I thought. I covered up some sins on the forend this way. But no, that’s where my lapse in judgement occurred. I’ll simply “merge” two lines together and get them back that way I thought. (did I mention how she can humiliate you?) So I did this, and now it looks like crap… And I did it not once, but twice. Even after running lines back across the other way it still looks bad.
I’m glad it’s a plain piece of cherry for a working rifle. If I had done this to the nice walnut I’m saving for project #3 I would have wept openly.
Here’s what I created:
