"We hand-frame roofs occasionally, which is using nominal lumber, like 2x10s or 2x12s, and then you cut plumb cuts and birds-mouths and fascia cuts and all these kinds of things. 

And so when we’re doing that, we’re making bell curves. Anything that’s going to be repetitive, my rule is I always create a template. 

So I make a piece, I mock it up until I’m happy with it. Sometimes it takes one try, sometimes it takes 10. When I’m happy with it, I take a big ol’ fat sharpie marker, write “TEMPLATE” on it so that no one touches it. I hang it on a wall, and my expectation is that when we leave the job, that template is still hanging there. 

And the reason that that matters is –  if anything happens AFTER construction and we need to go and reinstall another one of those pieces, if I still have the template available to me, there’s no thinking that needs to happen. I’m able to essentially, it’s…. you know, the equivalent of having a saved document on a computer that you could just take and put somewhere. 

So we’ve created this template, and then once we’ve figured out that’s what we want to do, at some point I get a young guy to cut, you know… in this case it was 20, sometimes it’s 200. 

And then at some point someone goes around and installs them all. And, you know, you make decisions as you’re doing that. Sometimes one of them doesn’t look good or it’s not sitting well. You know, we’re humans and we make mistakes. 

And so when YOU are the assembly line, and you’re making 60 of the same bell curve, it’s inevitable that three or four of them don’t look good. And so that’s what I try to tell the guys who are installing, is “think about what’s happening here. If it doesn’t look good, if it’s not working, if it doesn’t look symmetrical with everything else you’re putting it on, throw it away and put a new one on.” 

Spending 15 minutes recording an interview with an expert while looking at photo together is a tiny but mighty way to gather the logic of expert on-site workers that is rarely ever captured but the future of how we build will be shaped by how we preserve this knowledge now.