Blog: Some Days Are Diamonds By: John Heisz

That’s an expression I use often and it is also a credo I loosely live by (with all due deference to John Denver, I’m not really a fan): some days you can do no wrong and everything comes easy, with no mistakes. These are the diamonds and they are fairly rare. Whenever possible, I take full advantage of these days by doing as much as I can.

Then there are the other days, where it doesn’t seem to matter what you do, it doesn’t work out. For obvious reasons, I don’t call these days diamonds and I have found that the best approach for dealing with this is to stop and do something else. There are exceptions, of course, like work: it needs to get done and not when you feel like it. When it comes to anything that is done for enjoyment, I usually opt to put it aside when the frustration levels grow.

So, I’ve been having a run of those other type of day lately and I can’t seem to break out of it. It’s annoying because I have been working on my router table and can’t make any really good progress. My strategy is to chip away at it until one of two things happen: either I come out of it or I finish the project, whichever comes first. Doing it piece-meal is not very efficient, but better a little at a time than none at all. I am at the point now where just one “diamond” day will complete the build.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing the parts that are smaller and less troublesome to make. They are no less important, just less of a loss if I botch something.

This evening I made the handles for the doors on the storage compartments that are in the legs. I could have gone out and bought a pair of handles, but I thought it would be interesting to do something else, and save a few bucks in the process. I started with some parts:


I got a bunch of these stamped steel wrenches from a job and thought they would make neat looking pulls. I drilled holes though, 3″ apart and bolted them to the doors:


I took them off and painted them black. I think they look good, and it’s a
great way of putting something to good use that normally would be thrown out.