Carpenter running local models on a Mac Mini beside a 6x12 CNC. Helping shops own their stack instead of renting it. Named machines, named failures.
Boston, MA
Joined February 2026
- Tweets2K
- Following1.1K
- Followers1.3K
- Likes4.2K
Curved rails glue up over the radius scribed full size on the bench, and the line underneath sets the curve. It gets checked against the mating piece before the clamps come off.
The numbers come off the drawing once
"Typing a cut list off a screenshot. One wrong part number costs a sheet of ply and an afternoon, so the numbers come off the drawing once now."
Somebody asked last week what the software does for me that I would hate to go back to doing by hand. That reply was the short answer. This is the long one.
The screenshot is the part I would drop. A cut list that lives in a file gets read by every hand that touches the job, and it can be checked line by line against the drawing it came from. A picture of a cut list can only be read and retyped, and every retype moves a number without moving it on the drawing. That's a small move on a screen and a large one on a sheet.
On this side of the shop, the list is a file rather than a picture of one. Every job that leaves the software writes its own cut list as a CSV into the export bundle, beside the ticket PDF, and the printed ticket carries the same rows under its own heading. Put the drawing away and the list is still there, in the form the job gets run from.
The ticket is where the record gets honest, and it's the part I would hand anybody who asks what this is for. Two cut lists come off the same job and each one says which it is: one headed for the sheet parts, and one for the dimensional rails, marked not CNC sheet parts, so nobody walks a rail list to the machine and wonders where the panels went. Every row on that rail list carries its own provenance. A row taken off the board in hand says measured. A row nobody has put calipers on yet says NOMINAL - measure before cutting. The record tells you which numbers came off your own stock and which ones are still the print's promise, and nobody has to remember.
Under that list the ticket states what it doesn't cover. Rear screws are a shop operation, and the shop picks the screw, the pilot, the length and the edge distance. No drill geometry is generated. Wall anchoring and load capacity are unverified. Lumber cost is excluded. A record that names its own edges earns more trust than one that sounds finished, and a screenshot can't do that, because a screenshot doesn't know what it left out.
Then there's the half that isn't on the drawing at all. A cut list gets you to the second-to-last panel. The panel that lands in the corner is ripped to the wall it meets, because a corner never runs true, and the piece that takes that error is the piece that keeps the reveals even. Nobody can measure it in the office and nobody can predict it in software. What the record can do is take the number the minute it's found, so the next hand reads it instead of finding it again.
The far end of the same record is the bed of the 6x12: a curved frame on it, the moulded profile already cut into it and the curve run in one piece, off the numbers that were in the file. Nothing was retyped between the drawing and the cutter.
All of it runs on a Mac Mini in this shop, next to that machine. A customer's drawing stays on this floor, and it doesn't have to travel to somebody else's service to become a cut list. That's the half I wouldn't give back.
So the rule is one line. Enter the number once, whoever holds the job, and after that every hand reads. The second transcription is where the sheet of ply and the afternoon go.
On the shaper, the fence is cut to the same radius as the part, so the wood stays supported end to end. If the two radii disagree, the part rocks and the profile goes uneven.
Alternate the clamps over and under on a laminated top and it dries flat instead of bowing onto one face. Overtighten and the glue line goes dry where sanding can't reach.
The setup gets written down before the cut, not after, and the sheet says out loud what it hasn't proven: this operation family runs off no proven recipe yet. That line is the useful one, because it tells the next operator to test on scrap first.
teapawt.org/AugmentedPath/status/2…
The face you're not cutting
The door in that frame is standing on its edge in the shop, one face out, waiting. A bar clamp has it at the edge. Nothing's touching the face. There's a pencil circle on the upper panel where the hardware goes.
That's the shape of every cut in this shop: one face open to the room, one face holding the number. Take a case off this floor. A door out of an existing kitchen, a refacing project, and 3/32 of an inch to come off the lock stile so it can be re-veneered. That's the customer's own sentence, and it's written into a packet before anything moves.
The number that runs that cut isn't the 3/32. It's which face Z zero sits on. Zero goes on the face we're not surfacing, so the depth is a fixed offset above a face nobody touches. Target is the original thickness minus 0.0938, rounded down to 0.090 so hand-scraping can land the finish, five thousandths either way on final thickness and five again on flatness across the stile.
Then the other half of the same decision. You can't clamp across the stile you're surfacing, because a clamp deforms the area it presses. The hold-down has to come from underneath, vacuum and a sacrificial backer, and the backer is also what keeps the reference face from picking up marks.
Two passes instead of one, 0.045 and then 0.045, rather than a single 0.090 move, so an error in Z doesn't compound inside one plunge. Measure between them.
The cutter follows the same logic. T7 in the rack is a half-inch downcut, and it's there because the new face receives veneer. Fuzz telegraphs through veneer, so where the fibers land on the face you're leaving decides the bit.
That's the rest of this week's work told faster. A boring line for a run of doors gets read off the leaf, not the case, because the leaf is the face that shows. Inset doors put the case's error on the face, where overlay hides it. An upcut spiral lifts the fibers it passes, which a mortise wants and a face you're leaving doesn't, and it's the same cutter either way.
The bat on the fourth axis takes it as far as it goes. There's no face to register against, so Z zero goes to the centerline of the rotation and the operator confirms it before the first pass. The handle is 0.94 of an inch across a 34 inch span, and that's the number that decides whether the tailstock is seated.
Get the reference wrong and you don't get a bad measurement. You get a good door cut 3/32 under. The veneer goes on and telegraphs it, and the door is gone. What's on the line there isn't machine time. It's an existing part out of somebody's kitchen.
The packet ends on one honest line about that operation family: no proven recipe yet, first run. So the rule stays on the sheet beside the clamp. Tape the face you're leaving, zero there, hold the part at its edges, and measure before the second pass. Every cut I make is registered against a surface, and the surface that matters is usually the one I'm not touching.
Interior shutters lie flat in the reveal only if the rough opening was framed for the leaf plus the drywall. Frame it for the leaf alone and the shutter hits the casing.
Taking a sixteenth in one move leaves a Z error nowhere to be caught. Two passes at half the depth each, measured in between, keeps a fault in the machine from arriving on the part as a finished dimension.
teapawt.org/AugmentedPath/status/2…
The face you're not cutting
The door in that frame is standing on its edge in the shop, one face out, waiting. A bar clamp has it at the edge. Nothing's touching the face. There's a pencil circle on the upper panel where the hardware goes.
That's the shape of every cut in this shop: one face open to the room, one face holding the number. Take a case off this floor. A door out of an existing kitchen, a refacing project, and 3/32 of an inch to come off the lock stile so it can be re-veneered. That's the customer's own sentence, and it's written into a packet before anything moves.
The number that runs that cut isn't the 3/32. It's which face Z zero sits on. Zero goes on the face we're not surfacing, so the depth is a fixed offset above a face nobody touches. Target is the original thickness minus 0.0938, rounded down to 0.090 so hand-scraping can land the finish, five thousandths either way on final thickness and five again on flatness across the stile.
Then the other half of the same decision. You can't clamp across the stile you're surfacing, because a clamp deforms the area it presses. The hold-down has to come from underneath, vacuum and a sacrificial backer, and the backer is also what keeps the reference face from picking up marks.
Two passes instead of one, 0.045 and then 0.045, rather than a single 0.090 move, so an error in Z doesn't compound inside one plunge. Measure between them.
The cutter follows the same logic. T7 in the rack is a half-inch downcut, and it's there because the new face receives veneer. Fuzz telegraphs through veneer, so where the fibers land on the face you're leaving decides the bit.
That's the rest of this week's work told faster. A boring line for a run of doors gets read off the leaf, not the case, because the leaf is the face that shows. Inset doors put the case's error on the face, where overlay hides it. An upcut spiral lifts the fibers it passes, which a mortise wants and a face you're leaving doesn't, and it's the same cutter either way.
The bat on the fourth axis takes it as far as it goes. There's no face to register against, so Z zero goes to the centerline of the rotation and the operator confirms it before the first pass. The handle is 0.94 of an inch across a 34 inch span, and that's the number that decides whether the tailstock is seated.
Get the reference wrong and you don't get a bad measurement. You get a good door cut 3/32 under. The veneer goes on and telegraphs it, and the door is gone. What's on the line there isn't machine time. It's an existing part out of somebody's kitchen.
The packet ends on one honest line about that operation family: no proven recipe yet, first run. So the rule stays on the sheet beside the clamp. Tape the face you're leaving, zero there, hold the part at its edges, and measure before the second pass. Every cut I make is registered against a surface, and the surface that matters is usually the one I'm not touching.
A clamp presses exactly where it sits, so clamping across the surface you're cutting measures the cut off the clamp instead of the part. The hold-down has to come from underneath, and the backer board under the work is doing two jobs at once.
teapawt.org/AugmentedPath/status/2…
The face you're not cutting
The door in that frame is standing on its edge in the shop, one face out, waiting. A bar clamp has it at the edge. Nothing's touching the face. There's a pencil circle on the upper panel where the hardware goes.
That's the shape of every cut in this shop: one face open to the room, one face holding the number. Take a case off this floor. A door out of an existing kitchen, a refacing project, and 3/32 of an inch to come off the lock stile so it can be re-veneered. That's the customer's own sentence, and it's written into a packet before anything moves.
The number that runs that cut isn't the 3/32. It's which face Z zero sits on. Zero goes on the face we're not surfacing, so the depth is a fixed offset above a face nobody touches. Target is the original thickness minus 0.0938, rounded down to 0.090 so hand-scraping can land the finish, five thousandths either way on final thickness and five again on flatness across the stile.
Then the other half of the same decision. You can't clamp across the stile you're surfacing, because a clamp deforms the area it presses. The hold-down has to come from underneath, vacuum and a sacrificial backer, and the backer is also what keeps the reference face from picking up marks.
Two passes instead of one, 0.045 and then 0.045, rather than a single 0.090 move, so an error in Z doesn't compound inside one plunge. Measure between them.
The cutter follows the same logic. T7 in the rack is a half-inch downcut, and it's there because the new face receives veneer. Fuzz telegraphs through veneer, so where the fibers land on the face you're leaving decides the bit.
That's the rest of this week's work told faster. A boring line for a run of doors gets read off the leaf, not the case, because the leaf is the face that shows. Inset doors put the case's error on the face, where overlay hides it. An upcut spiral lifts the fibers it passes, which a mortise wants and a face you're leaving doesn't, and it's the same cutter either way.
The bat on the fourth axis takes it as far as it goes. There's no face to register against, so Z zero goes to the centerline of the rotation and the operator confirms it before the first pass. The handle is 0.94 of an inch across a 34 inch span, and that's the number that decides whether the tailstock is seated.
Get the reference wrong and you don't get a bad measurement. You get a good door cut 3/32 under. The veneer goes on and telegraphs it, and the door is gone. What's on the line there isn't machine time. It's an existing part out of somebody's kitchen.
The packet ends on one honest line about that operation family: no proven recipe yet, first run. So the rule stays on the sheet beside the clamp. Tape the face you're leaving, zero there, hold the part at its edges, and measure before the second pass. Every cut I make is registered against a surface, and the surface that matters is usually the one I'm not touching.
The oval in that screen lands on the lattice grid, not beside it. Set it a hair off and the field of squares around it reads crooked, and the fix is re-cutting the panel, not the oval.
On a to-thickness cut the number that runs it isn't how much you're taking off, it's which face Z zero sits on. Zero goes on the face that stays, so the depth is a fixed offset above a surface nobody touches and the re-measure is a comparison instead of a guess.
teapawt.org/AugmentedPath/status/2…
The face you're not cutting
The door in that frame is standing on its edge in the shop, one face out, waiting. A bar clamp has it at the edge. Nothing's touching the face. There's a pencil circle on the upper panel where the hardware goes.
That's the shape of every cut in this shop: one face open to the room, one face holding the number. Take a case off this floor. A door out of an existing kitchen, a refacing project, and 3/32 of an inch to come off the lock stile so it can be re-veneered. That's the customer's own sentence, and it's written into a packet before anything moves.
The number that runs that cut isn't the 3/32. It's which face Z zero sits on. Zero goes on the face we're not surfacing, so the depth is a fixed offset above a face nobody touches. Target is the original thickness minus 0.0938, rounded down to 0.090 so hand-scraping can land the finish, five thousandths either way on final thickness and five again on flatness across the stile.
Then the other half of the same decision. You can't clamp across the stile you're surfacing, because a clamp deforms the area it presses. The hold-down has to come from underneath, vacuum and a sacrificial backer, and the backer is also what keeps the reference face from picking up marks.
Two passes instead of one, 0.045 and then 0.045, rather than a single 0.090 move, so an error in Z doesn't compound inside one plunge. Measure between them.
The cutter follows the same logic. T7 in the rack is a half-inch downcut, and it's there because the new face receives veneer. Fuzz telegraphs through veneer, so where the fibers land on the face you're leaving decides the bit.
That's the rest of this week's work told faster. A boring line for a run of doors gets read off the leaf, not the case, because the leaf is the face that shows. Inset doors put the case's error on the face, where overlay hides it. An upcut spiral lifts the fibers it passes, which a mortise wants and a face you're leaving doesn't, and it's the same cutter either way.
The bat on the fourth axis takes it as far as it goes. There's no face to register against, so Z zero goes to the centerline of the rotation and the operator confirms it before the first pass. The handle is 0.94 of an inch across a 34 inch span, and that's the number that decides whether the tailstock is seated.
Get the reference wrong and you don't get a bad measurement. You get a good door cut 3/32 under. The veneer goes on and telegraphs it, and the door is gone. What's on the line there isn't machine time. It's an existing part out of somebody's kitchen.
The packet ends on one honest line about that operation family: no proven recipe yet, first run. So the rule stays on the sheet beside the clamp. Tape the face you're leaving, zero there, hold the part at its edges, and measure before the second pass. Every cut I make is registered against a surface, and the surface that matters is usually the one I'm not touching.