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r/woodworking • … • u/sideshow031

Anybody struggle under a micromanager in a small shop?

I have few places to air my specific grievances and if this inappropriate for the sub, I understand. I’m the detail guy in my wood shop. Beams, mantels, shelves are our bread and butter, veneer on 5/8 ply. Half of what we do is to-order, the rest is on a stock size basis. Order comes down for some shelves, 4@ 3x11x48” and this customer wants cutouts for glass. No problem. Normally, our shelves have support spacers in them to keep the faces parallel under clamping pressure, but I figure that with the cutout and with the glass on order being completely clear, I’m gonna build them so the interior is as clean as I can get it. No marks, no glue drip, no nothing. I also minimize the spacers around the exterior so they do not interfere with the cutout but glue them in to provide add’l stability to the workpiece. The brackets to mount the shelves will be visible through the glass, and only contact the upper face from the bottom at the lip of the shelf and at the wall, nothing in between.

The pieces get made, go all the way through finishing, come out great, and i wind up taking a week off work to handle business out of state. When I come back to work, my shelves are sitting with full length spacers sloppily cut and screwed in (adding no structural support) and a big black stamp with the company logo has been stamped haphazardly in all four shelves. Normally all of our beams and mantels get stamps, but only the contractors and installers see the back side of our products.

I built these shelves in a way that would allow them to be displays, either with string lights or garland or Christmas ornaments etc. As they are now, the only way to put lipstick on this pig is to either paint the interior or put frosted glass in. The logo can’t be sanded out as the ink has penetrated the outermost layer of the plywood, and the spacers are gonna throw shadows all over the place when the lights get turned on.

My joy has been utterly destroyed and I’ve been left feeling like I don’t have the trust of my superiors to make calls of any kind, and that all of my experience and expertise has been undermined.

Anybody else deal with people digging their micromanaging hands into your craftsmanship?

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