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My old shop teacher said stop making cardboard models look nice and I finally get it
I ran into my old shop teacher at a hardware store in Akron last week and showed him pics of my cardboard desk mockup. He said "why does it look better than the real one will" and it kind of wrecked me. I have been spending 2 or 3 nights on each mockup lately, taping edges clean and drawing on fake wood grain instead of just cutting and taping fast. He pointed out that the point of cardboard is to answer questions, not to look good, and anything past 45 minutes on a mockup is just arts and crafts. So now I time myself and stop when the tape runs out or the timer hits 45, whichever comes first. My last 3 mockups looked like trash but I caught a shelf spacing problem before I bought any plywood. Does anyone else time their builds or am I the only one who needed a 70 year old guy to say it out loud?
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the_caleb8d ago
45 minutes is a fine cutoff but the timer is not really the point. Your teacher was getting at what the mockup is for, not how long it takes. A cardboard model that answers your questions in 20 minutes is done, while one that runs 2 hours but solves a tricky corner is still doing its job.
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