On June 8, 2018 at 10:53, highfigh said...
On a semi-related note, I have been waiting for a cabinet needed to house some equipment in the den of a job. I remember a math class word problem that was worded to find out how we understood what we read, or not. In the question, it referred to a field trip and a number of people, but the bus capacity wouldn't allow all of them to sit in a whole number of buses, so the teacher had to explain that in order for the 143 people to be seated when the capacity of each bus was 52, three were needed, not 2.75.
Some engineer somewhere might argue with this conclusion by saying that if there were three buses, then each bus would have to have 47 2/3 people on it... and that would just be inhumane. There is always some rounding off between the world of the engineer and the world of... the world!
The cabinetmaker asked for the dimensions of the equipment and I now know that I should have told him the width I wanted, not the answer to his question. Sure enough, 17-1/4" equipment and 17-1/2" wide openings.
That's a hard lesson to learn. We have to think about what they're going to do with the information, and be sure that it's what WE want to do with the information! My go-to shelf width is 24" since most components can be slid forward and rotated for wire access on a 24" wide shelf. Obviously I usually don't get that size shelf!
Earlier experiences with cabinetmakers taught me that professions have their own concepts of things. This one cabinet guy referred to the left-right dimension of one shelf as its width, but he called the left-right dimension of another shelf its length. I asked him why. Turns out the first shelf was particle board and the second shelf was wood, and the dimension in line with wood grain is its length.
From that I worked this out: When you deal with a construction trade, be aware that there are three dimensions: height, length, width, depth, breadth, thickness, and gauge. Those are the three dimensions.
I learned from that one to always say "left-right" or "up-down" or "front-back." An "up-down" dimension of something below a reference point could be called depth, but a "front-back" dimension of a shelf opening could also be called depth.
Another cabinetmaker made a cabinet wide enough for two components to sit side by side, but it a center post made the openings not wide enough for even one standard width component to be inserted straight in from the front. There was a shelf, but it also could not go straight in. He made that "work" by making the shelf in two pieces, a front half and a back half.
