Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Latch

Box LatchMe and Mr Accuracy have never been exactly been the best of friends. Despite my best efforts, no matter what I do, jobs always seem to require a little bit of bodging. Over the years I've evolved all sort of tricks to get around this problem - cutting parts oversize and trimming back to an edge being a popular example.

At school anyone who taught me lessons involving construction would despair. I could measure all I liked and yet when the hole was drilled or the bit of metal cut, something would have gone wrong. Once I had to mount a couple of switches made from keyboard space bars on a PCB. When I came to fit them in place I discovered that the copper pads I had laid out were in such a position that the space bars overlapped. Not by much but enough to be embarrassing. I of course fixed this by shortening one and making a cut-out in the other then tried to excuse it by saying I wanted to make sure they both operated at once - no one was fooled.

So it's no great surprise that the toolbox I'm building doesn't quite work. The door on the front matches the main box. Nearly. One of the hinges is a bit too high and I know if I try and fix it, this will go wrong. Instead I have to live with the latches needing a little tug to line them up. Not much of a problem, but annoying.

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