Mistakes? Fess up!

[Pat Foster]

I stumbled across an old thread where mistakes were mentioned, and thought maybe a thread on the subject would be worthwhile, if it hasn't been done already.

Here are some of mine:

When a classical neck with a Spanish heel was nearly finished, I found that I'd made an 11-fret neck. It became a stress test victim for the headstock v-joint, so it wasn't all for naught.

Fretboard markers from the fifth fret to the 17th were all one fret off.

I kept breaking the shell for an elaborate inlay, then had success on the fourth try, only to lose it. After two days searching the benches and the shop floor, I found it stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

There were many others, but with each new mistake--and some repeats--they became less of a frustration and more of a lesson. Some lessons were better remembered than others.

How boutchoo?

[Bob Orr]

once glued a heel block on the top surface of a neck that already had the headstock glued on!

[Pat Foster]

Love it, Bob! That's one I haven't done . . . yet.

[Darrel Friesen]

I would fess up but this forum only allows 58,000 character responses.

[Randy Roberts]

Pat,

Your 11 fret neck really brought back memories for me.

https://www.mimf.com/library/Randy_Robe ... -2005.html

probably my best other screwup was completely finishing a really involved tree of life full length fretboard inlay, fretting it, not being happy with the seating of the 12 fret, and thinking "I'll just pop the fret out with my thumbnail"....
fretboard split lengthwise full length of the board not just one split but 2 dividing it into 3 long splints held together only by the remaining frets.
Somehow managed to get it flat again and glued, but not before testing it as you did yours, only my testing regimen leans more toward aerodynamic. Made it to the middle of the neighbor's yard.

[Clay Schaeffer]

Hi Randy,
Reading your linked post reminded me of one of the few aggravations I have had with the archives. People edited my posts and in doing so changed the meaning of what I said by deleting words and at times entire postings. I'm sure there originally was a comment after "Hi Randy" that has been edited out. They may as well have removed the whole post, as they did on several other occasions.

[Jim McConkey]

Deb had us aggressively remove entire "content-less" posts in the old days when prepping a discussion for archiving (to minimize size), but we were (and still are!) absolutely forbidden from ever changing anyone's posts, short of very minor corrects. Other than staff, only the original poster can ever edit a post. Even if staff absolutely has to change something, the poster is informed of what was changed and why. We strive to be completely as hands-off as possible. The only things we ever change are spelling (and mostly only in titles), removing content prohibited by Forum rules, and the occasional fixing of a bad link.

[Clay Schaeffer]

Hi Jim,
We will have to agree to disagree - that has not been my experience, at least with the old archives. If you read the thread Randy posted you will notice that Chuck Tweedy references something I wrote which apparently has been edited into oblivion. I am sure I am not the only one this has happened to. No one ever contacted me about my posts being edited, I only noticed it when searching the archives.
I recognize that editing and archiving the discussions is a relatively thankless job, so take my complaint as a minor one.

[Jim McConkey]

More stuff may have happened in the old days, Clay, but it has been many, many years since there has been any pruning for archiving at all, so it is kind of a moot point. Nothing is pruned now, just minor spelling corrections and the rare prohibited material removal. This new phpBB software we use now automatically enforces notification of changes. I can't even remember what software we used 20 years ago!

[Randy Roberts]

Jim & Clay,
Glad I checked back in, I think you are both right...
When we switched over to this software I checked a number of my old posts in the library, and many of them were missing parts of peoples posts, or they suddenly stopped, when I know the original thread continued for several more posts.

I don't think they were dropped during the original archiving, all of them I've noticed only appeared ( or disappeared) after the change to the present software.

Why I had no involvement with whatever was done in the conversion, I can't imagine anyone in their right mind would have gone through all those years and years of posts to edit them or re-enter them again for the new library. I assume the old archive was converted into the new library by way of some automatic method (can you tell how computer literate I am?).

I've always assumed the missing posts and truncations of threads were just glitches from the conversion that dropped parts of the threads when converting them into this software's libraries. None of what I've noticed missing in the current Library threads have rhyme nor reason nor make any sense from a human standpoint (like the square boxes replacing punctuation marks) so I figure it was just that there was a crack in the black box that let them seep out as the thread passed through it.