the best designer in the world

That's extreme. It is how one contractor described me to his client. He followed that by saying at your finger tips. Perhaps that is true the best designer in the world at your finger tips. Being at someones finger tips is something that the best designer can't offer, but I can. At least if you live in the Boston area. I don't pretend to be the best designer in any area, I know better than that. My point is that I'm available, we are not so big that you can't touch us. If you need us to design cabinetry than I can hang with the best of them. I've been studying design my entire life, my experience has demanded good design. It is a great opportunity to work with professional designers but it doesn't always happen that way. when I work with professional designers I learn show much, and remain humble. A professional designed cabinet shows good proportion.
Yesterday we had a kaizen event here in the shop. Sondu led the event. It was a huge success. WE studied cabinet construction, we used our next project as an example job c74, we will start to build next week. You can imagine how helpful it is for us as a team to gather around a work bench and discuss the construction strategy. We discussed how it will be built and assembled. We came up with a strict procedure, that has been developed from our past mistakes. From this event came three more products that are condsiderd push work. Now we have nine standard products for our cabinets. Not visible products but products that are behind the scenes products that the client doesn't care about. It's important to identify the push products so we can make these products once or twice a year and pull them of a shelf as the production requires it. This is perhaps one of the most challenging things for my shop. Why? because my shop is a custom job shop. Every job is different from the previous one. We are constantly changing what we make and how we make it, they are different products. That challenge is also our strenght, being able to change what we build to suit the needs of the customer, we are a customer focused business.
I just came in from the shop, Gagan has made the niftiest sled for the powermatic table saw. He is making half joints for a door where the frame is 3" wide. A very tricky thing to do without practical experience. I'm very impressed with Gagan's work. It is so clean, many guys will use the same tools as Gagan but the work doesn't look clean when it's finished. It's about a touch, and having a good touch when setting up the machines and assembling the work, it's constant concentration to what you are doing, always, never can your attention deviate that is when mistakes happen. I'm impressed with his attention span. It's one of the challenges that I have when I go into the field. I've got mad bills to pay, and so many other things to throw my attention span off my work.