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DAE have a jobsite trick backfire in a way you didn't expect?
So I was framing a small addition out in Boise last week and I got this bright idea to pre-drill all my studs at once with a jig I threw together from scrap plywood. Took me about 40 minutes to build the thing, and I was feeling pretty smug watching it knock out holes way faster than marking each one by hand. Problem was I set the stop block about a quarter inch off, so every single hole ended up in the wrong spot once the wall went up. I didn't catch it until the electrician showed up and started laughing at me, said he'd never seen a stud bay so consistently wrong in 20 years on the job. Had to pull 14 studs and redo the whole run, which ate my afternoon and then some. Funny thing is the jig itself worked great, it was just my setup that was off. Now I clamp a scrap block and check one hole before I drill the rest. Anybody else got a shortcut that worked perfect in your head and turned into a mess in the field?
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jason_knight5d ago
The part that really gets me is how long you ran it before catching it. Forty minutes to build the jig, then you probably drilled a whole pile of studs in like five minutes flat, and every one of them was junk. That's the worst trade off. You save twenty minutes of marking and lose three hours of rework. What I've started doing is the same thing you said at the end, but I go one step farther and run a full dry layout on the floor with one stud before I commit. Lay the plate down, set the first stud where it goes, check the hole against where the box actually lands, then cut loose. Cost me maybe two minutes and it's caught a bad setup twice now.
The other thing nobody talks about is that a jig makes you faster at being wrong. Hand marking, you'd notice around stud three that something looked off. With a jig you just feed them through and trust it, so the mistake stacks up in a big pile before your brain kicks in. Speed hides errors. Same reason guys cut a whole bundle of rafters on one bad setting and then stand there looking at a stack of firewood.
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