In this episode, we talk about the phrase by Microsoft Manager Paul Maritz. Eat Your Own Dog Food. You should use and live with your own designs to know they are good. Test your design out, and iterate on better versions.
Audio Version
Video Version
Show Notes
Greg’s 1st Guitar tool he made, the Tremolo Setup Tool For Floyd Rose Bridge
Brian’s prototyping a 3d printed battery dispenser for rechargeable batteries.
Brian is testing an outdoor finish for a door by Sherwin Williams. It is a 3-application finish.
- Moisture Barrier – V81V1 No Catalyst required
- Urethane Sealer F63FH3 add Catalyst V66V29
- Top Coat F63FH2 add Catalyst V66V29
Hosted by
Greg Porter
https://skyscraperguitars.com/
Greg On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregsgaragekc/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SkyscraperGuitars
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GregsGarage
Brian Benham
https://www.brianbenham.com/
Brian On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benham_design/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXO8f1IIliMKKlu5PgSpodQ
Transcript
00:00:00:03 – 00:00:02:23
Brian Benham
All right. You’re listening to the Makers Quest podcast. I’m Brian Benham.
00:00:03:09 – 00:00:34:04
Greg Porter
And I’m Greg Porter. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about eating your own dog food. And this is a quote that comes from Paul Moritz at Microsoft, talking about the company itself using their own software and being happy to use it and how important it is to use your own products, your own designs in your daily work as as a matter of practice, but also a matter of making sure that the things that you’re making are appropriate for the things that you’re trying to do.
00:00:34:05 – 00:01:00:19
Greg Porter
And Brian, I know just kind of off the bat, we might talk a little bit about my guitar tool company and how it got started. It got it got started. Exactly. For that reason, I was using other people’s tools. They weren’t working in the manner that I wanted them to work. And so it’s like, Well, put your money where your mouth is and put up or shut up and either make the tool better or stop, stop complaining about the tools you have.
00:01:01:02 – 00:01:27:14
Greg Porter
And that was literally the genesis for my guitar tool company was, I think I can be a better mousetrap. And I still to this day take in guitars to work on and set up and fix and repair. And I grab my tools. I have a drawer full of tools over here from other manufacturers, but mine are always the first that I grab, and most of the time they’re the only ones.
00:01:27:14 – 00:01:43:04
Greg Porter
A lot of times I’ll use other people’s tools as a check just to make sure that I’m on the mark and that my stuff is being made to the level of quality that there’s is for sure. And it’s just an interesting way to approach your own work to live and die by your own sword.
00:01:43:11 – 00:01:50:01
Brian Benham
Yeah. So what was the what was the product that was the jumping off point that you were like, And I am done with this thing. I’m going to go make my own.
00:01:51:11 – 00:02:11:17
Greg Porter
It was, interestingly enough, and let’s see if I can move my microphone so you can see some guitars. This blue guitar back here has a bridge on it called a Floyd Rose Bridge, and it’s a tremolo, so it moves and can bend the frequency of the note that you’ve struck. And those things are really difficult to set up.
00:02:11:17 – 00:02:36:21
Greg Porter
In fact, maybe we’ll hit pause and I’ll grab it and show off kind of the madness. Okay, Is that bridge? Hang on. So the bridge is this piece down here, and these are the saddles here. And those saddles have an adjustment to control the intonation on a string. And that’s that’s basically the divisions of of the string that make the tones.
00:02:36:21 – 00:03:05:21
Greg Porter
And you want those to be tunable because the string thickness changes things and whatever else. So on this bridge, you have to loosen this little Alan head bolt down here, and then you have to push that saddle in and out. And it’s a super pain in the neck because there’s £100 attention on these strings. And so the old days you would tune one string and then you would loosen this and then you would move the saddle in and out and you would tighten it back up and see if it was in tune.
00:03:05:21 – 00:03:27:03
Greg Porter
And it’s sort of luck of the draw. You just keep doing it until you find the right spot. So this little tool hooks on the back and then the little tang there goes into the saddle and it works just like a clamp. So there’s a screw in the back and you can adjust it with an Allen key. And so that keeps a grip on that saddle after you’ve loosened the bolt.
00:03:27:03 – 00:03:45:18
Greg Porter
And it allows you to in real time sort of screw it in or let it out and then you can test it as you’re going and you don’t have to de tune, adjust, re tune and check. It’s all in one kind of motion. Well, there’s another competitor out there who has a tool to do exactly what my tool did.
00:03:45:18 – 00:04:02:19
Greg Porter
And after I broke three of them and stripped out the screws on his, I was I was frustrated enough where I was like, you know what? I’m just never going to do this with a tool again. I’m just going to do it the old fashioned way. Trial and error and we’re going to make it work. And then I sat down and I was like, You know what?
00:04:03:00 – 00:04:20:06
Greg Porter
This might be a problem. You could solve. Greg And other people might be happy that you solved it. So that was where I designed this little tool. Very simple. Just three little pieces. Like I said, with a screw. And then there’s a little pin in it to allow it to slide. I don’t know if you can see that, but it’s called the pick pocket.
00:04:20:06 – 00:04:43:14
Greg Porter
And at the end of the day, we make them now by the thousand and we sell a couple of handfuls of them every single day. And it’s one of those things where you step back and it’s like, you know, if I would have just given up on on that other person’s tool and just said, Well, I guess there’s nothing out there for me and not designed my own it, It would I would have missed that opportunity, number one, to design the tool.
00:04:43:14 – 00:05:14:09
Greg Porter
But number two, to start the company that now my wife works full time for, I work part time for. I get to do some really cool design work. I have a good friend who’s my full time machinist. You know, there’s a whole ecosystem built off of the back of this tiny little tool. And you know, when I do a lot of setups on those types of guitars that have a Floyd Rose Bridge, because I know how to do it, and I set up some guitars for fairly famous people and my tools are used on stages all over the world.
00:05:14:09 – 00:05:23:21
Greg Porter
So it’s really just kind of an interesting back to the eating your own dog food type of thing is put up or shut up, and then if you make the tool, that’s what you’re going to use to do work for the rest of your life.
00:05:24:07 – 00:05:49:11
Brian Benham
Yeah. So just as a side note, if you’re listening to the audio version only of this and you are a guitar player, definitely go to our website, The Maker’s Quest, and I’ll all have a timestamp that you can go to to see on our YouTube video what that tool looks like. So definitely if you’re a guitar maker, because not only is it a very useful tool, it’s very a beautiful looking, well-made, made tool.
00:05:50:04 – 00:06:14:19
Greg Porter
But I’ll say one more thing about about that before we leave. As as a design professional, one of the things I noticed in the guitar Tool world is it’s dominated by machinists that are very pragmatic. So when you look at a lot of the tools out there, they’re not visually appealing and a lot of times they’re very back.
00:06:14:19 – 00:06:32:13
Greg Porter
I say barbaric, but they’re very simple in their design, and most of the people who design them is very purpose driven. I need this thing to do one thing, let’s do it. And they don’t think about how it feels in the hand. They don’t think about what it looks like on the shelf. They don’t think about any of those things.
00:06:32:13 – 00:06:59:13
Greg Porter
And I tried to really look at the array of guitar tools that were available and say, How can we make this better? This one cuts my hand because nobody deep heard it, or the edges are just sharp on this thing and they might ship and instruments finish. You know, sometimes we’re working on $20,000 instruments and the last thing you want to do is give yourself an extra thousand dollars of refinish work when you’re working on one of these.
00:06:59:13 – 00:07:14:15
Greg Porter
And just stepping back and and asking yourself the question, how can I make this one step or two steps better than what’s on the market that has given us a serious advantage when it comes to some of our tools and the ability to just sell them.
00:07:14:22 – 00:07:41:19
Brian Benham
So just to kind of go to a little darker place here in there in the world, is that you or you’re designing for quality and a better use? And I was out to lunch with my grandfather a while back and he’s definitely gotten up in age and in the years and he ordered a salad. You know, he’s trying to take care of himself and and eat healthy and all that good stuff.
00:07:41:19 – 00:08:02:16
Brian Benham
And he ordered a salad and the salad came in a plastic container, one of those clamshell things. And of course, his hands aren’t as strong as they used to be. They shake a little bit and he’s trying to open this salad. And it was just a struggle because there’s no tab sticking out of this thing to open it.
00:08:02:16 – 00:08:33:15
Brian Benham
So it’s like whoever designed that thing designed it for you. I’ll quote air quotes, normal, healthy people that have strong hands that could get their fingernails underneath there to pry this thing open. But he had such a struggle to get it open because it’s just so poorly designed. And if they had taken their grandfather out to lunch that day, they would have been able to realize that, hey, I can make a small design change that would make it easy for everybody to open exactly in.
00:08:33:15 – 00:08:54:01
Greg Porter
And I may have told this story before, I can’t recall, but I think it goes right along the lines with with what you’re talking about. Brian, When I was at the Autodesk build space out in Boston in 2018, 2019, somewhere in there a few years back, it was 2017, we had one of the other builders in residence had lost an arm.
00:08:54:01 – 00:09:26:10
Greg Porter
He had he had to have his arm amputated because of an infection and he was there inventing some really cool mountain bike apparatus because he was a big mountain bike rider. And so it was a clip for him to use a mountain bike handlebar with a carbon fiber prosthetic. And he was using a milling machine. And the doors if the doors to the milling machine opened during a milling operation, it stopped the spindle, but it didn’t stop the movement of the table.
00:09:26:10 – 00:09:50:07
Greg Porter
So you would instantly break a tool and you would ruin your work piece if those doors came open. And of all things that Autodesk, you know, these guys make insane amounts of software. This was at the build space with a tool to make anything you could ever dream of. They had copper wire wrapped around these door handles so that the door would stay closed well, and milling machine was going and I got there.
00:09:50:07 – 00:10:18:13
Greg Porter
I’m like, This is the worst solution I’ve ever seen for anything in my life. So I went and I was like, you know, I’m just going to make it my mission every day to design something and 3D print something on a daily basis, just as an exercise, just to make myself better, to speak that language. And so I made a little clip that would go around the handles for the door, and the first version of the clip just had kind of two rounded sides and and you just clipped it on one handle and it clipped to the other one.
00:10:18:13 – 00:10:39:08
Greg Porter
It kept the doors closed. Well, when this gentleman had the amputated arm went over to use it, I realized that you had to have two hands to open it. And I was like, Nope, we need to solve this problem better. We need to make this a universal design. So all I did was just put a little tab on the end of it so that you could just grab it and pop it with your thumb.
00:10:39:08 – 00:11:04:12
Greg Porter
And just that little iteration. All of a sudden, this guy went from having to use this terrible copper wire thing to keep this milling machine closed, to this really elegant snap lock that you would never have another problem. Because actually they said those wires sometimes would come loose. And if you weren’t watching it again, part ruined tool, broken havoc ensues.
00:11:04:12 – 00:11:09:18
Brian Benham
Yeah. So you think that the torque it was a tarmac machine?
00:11:09:18 – 00:11:12:00
Greg Porter
It was. It was 1100, I believe. Yeah.
00:11:12:00 – 00:11:32:08
Brian Benham
Yes. You think the torchmark manufacturers, the Torchmark would update their software on the inside, knowing that if the doors opened, it needed it to stop everything. Not just the spindle, Right? Like, yeah, that could have been something that if they used their own machine that they should have known like, okay, we need to solve this problem.
00:11:33:03 – 00:11:59:24
Greg Porter
Well, even deeper than that, I can tell you I have the same machine here. You can disable and enable any fixtures and interlocks that you want to or sorry, any fixtures, any features or interlocks that you want to. And it was Autodesk’s decision to stop it in that manner. So they had somebody on their risk management department who said the table is not going to hurt someone, just the spindle.
00:12:00:06 – 00:12:01:22
Greg Porter
So that’s what we need to turn off.
00:12:02:01 – 00:12:07:21
Brian Benham
So they didn’t realize that their decision, which started a chain reaction of other things.
00:12:08:03 – 00:12:33:16
Greg Porter
Yes. And interestingly enough, and this is, you know, I think I think when we’re talking about eating your own dog food, using your own products, it’s it’s so that you’re not tone deaf. Right. That’s that’s the whole point of it. And unfortunately, it was pointed out by several people to several several users to several people at Autodesk that, hey, this really doesn’t work.
00:12:33:16 – 00:12:59:13
Greg Porter
Like it really messes things up. We need to fix this. And it was just I don’t know how long it was ignored because it was happening before I got there. It was happening after and that was a four month period for me and I’m not dogging on Autodesk. They did a lot of stuff. Absolutely, 100% right. But it was just funny how that one little detail, which every time you break a tool that’s probably 30 or $40 and then you ruin your part, which wastes a lot of time.
00:12:59:20 – 00:13:14:22
Greg Porter
So anyway, it was interesting to see, number one, how you could design that small feature to help out with somebody who could only use one hand to open a machine, but then also to solve another problem in there, you know, breaking tools and that sort of thing. Yeah.
00:13:15:05 – 00:13:43:07
Brian Benham
Yeah. So I don’t have a good transition to transition to my next thought about that. But I something came very clear to me that you and I were about the age where we’re the last of the analogs. Like my kids. Everything’s digital. They they jump on on a digital thing, and they can very quickly figure it out. But an analog thing, they have to stop, be like, okay, what is what’s going on with this switch or what is this thing do?
00:13:43:20 – 00:14:11:06
Brian Benham
And I think as we’ve moved away from the analog world to the digital world and all these new things are being designed in the digital world, I think we also are losing some really great design opportunities. Recently our washer and dryer broke and so we bought a new washer dryer set and this thing has a touch screen on it to start and stop your your art is to program your load or start your washing load or whatever.
00:14:11:18 – 00:14:27:19
Brian Benham
And I’m like, Oh, this is cool. My, my kids, they, they know how to use it very easily, even though they pretend they don’t want don’t because they don’t want to do laundry. But you know, that’s a whole different other thing. But I was doing my own laundry and I listened to podcasts and music all day long when I’m in the shop.
00:14:27:19 – 00:14:48:10
Brian Benham
So when I popped into the house to change the laundry over, I was still wearing my earbuds and I hit the start button on the touch screen. And I didn’t think anything happened because there was no analog feedback. I couldn’t hear the pump start up and I thought, Well, this is really a terrible design for someone that’s hearing impaired because they’re not going to know if it’s running or not.
00:14:48:10 – 00:15:05:21
Brian Benham
They got to stand there. Nothing else happens on the screen. Once you hit start. If you don’t hear it, beep because you know you’re you’re deaf, right? Or you have like me wearing earbuds. And so I’m just standing there like, I think the washer is broken. And I had to take my earbuds out to investigate, like, what’s going on with this.
00:15:05:21 – 00:15:19:10
Brian Benham
And then I realized that it was running, but nothing, nothing happened if I couldn’t hear it right, because there is no click like the old one had a click. When you push the button, it had some kind of what do they call that? Haptic feedback.
00:15:19:22 – 00:15:41:17
Greg Porter
Yes. Interesting. And I know there are tons of things of that nature as a as an architect, you know, a building designer. And I would say even a site designer, we we are bound by the federal Regulations for Americans with Disabilities Act and the work that they put in and some of the standards that they’ve developed over the years.
00:15:42:01 – 00:16:13:16
Greg Porter
And, you know, it’s still a work in progress. They still update it, they still add features to it. And interestingly enough, you mentioned hearing impaired people think when you talk about disabled people and I know I know disabled is starting to become kind of a bad word, but people with impairments, everybody thinks to someone in a wheelchair and it goes so far beyond that and it can be visual impairment, it can be hearing impaired, it can be people who have depth perception and issues.
00:16:13:16 – 00:16:35:22
Greg Porter
All of those things, I think, start to feed into how how do you design we now call it universal design. So how can someone use a sidewalk next to a street and still be safe if they have? And then you start thinking of all the different impairments somebody might have or all the different challenges they might face on a daily basis.
00:16:35:22 – 00:17:04:14
Greg Porter
And it’s really interesting. And I think, you know, when we look at our shops, Brian, you know, we we build our shops and we build the things in our shops generally, I’m going to say for us sometimes it’s for a client, but if you’re testing out a chair, you’re the one sitting in it. Or if you’re testing out a set of drawers, you’re the one pulling them open and being able to think of things through the lens of somebody else’s life is an interesting way to design pieces.
00:17:05:00 – 00:17:38:14
Brian Benham
Yeah, Not just like you mentioned a chair, like I’m the one sitting in the chair, so I wanted to make it comfortable for me, but it might not be comfortable for them, but not just, just your comfort, but also for like your, your workflow. So I designed a office for a client, their home office, and he had very particular requirements for where his shredder was to go, what side the filing cabinet was going to be on, where the printer was going to go, whether this wireless thing could work or not, and then how to route the wires around the desk.
00:17:38:14 – 00:17:59:15
Brian Benham
And then that created a whole nother thing that he didn’t want all these wires showing and we had to route the wires in the desk. But the wire from the monitor was not long enough to reach the computer to root it the way he wanted. So we had a whole new problem solving. Is this going to be able to get an extension cord for an HDMI cable or or what?
00:17:59:15 – 00:18:13:11
Brian Benham
So yeah, there’s a lot of things to think about that not just designing for yourself, but in eating your own dog food. But what is other people like to have, what their flavor of dog food is, I guess for lack of a better word.
00:18:13:11 – 00:18:36:03
Greg Porter
And I think it’s interesting, you know, when you when you look at that challenge of using the things that you’ve designed or fabricated or modified in a lot of in a lot of ways, I think, you know, some people see barriers to entry on certain things of, well, I can’t make that thing from scratch. A lot of times you don’t have to make that thing from scratch.
00:18:36:03 – 00:19:03:06
Greg Porter
You can start with somebody who did 99% of the work and then you can modify it and make it yours. And so many of the of the prototype tools that I’ve made over the years, that’s how I get from point A to point Z very quickly is you let somebody else’s design get you to maybe T in the alphabet and then you’re just working on that last little chunk and you don’t have to worry so much about the precision.
00:19:03:06 – 00:19:24:16
Greg Porter
Then it becomes more about the ergonomics, the design, the the fill in, the blank feature that is going to make what you’re doing more desirable, not necessarily for a customer, but maybe for you in how you use your things. And I’ve always had a funny word that I’ve used, and if you have, if you’re ever in my shop, you’ll see it.
00:19:25:05 – 00:19:48:20
Greg Porter
I call things Porter modified and it is basically because everything I buy, not everything. A lot of things that I buy, I modify because I start to use them in some way and I go, You know what? It would work better for me if I did this. And, you know, people kind of wince. It’s like, Well, you just spent $500 on that tool and now you’re carving into it with a grinder because your hand doesn’t feel right.
00:19:48:24 – 00:19:56:21
Greg Porter
It’s like, Yeah, I’m taking it from a $500 tool to $1,000 tool because it’s going to fit and work exactly like I need it to.
00:19:57:00 – 00:20:19:12
Brian Benham
100%. I have done that in my shop as well. The perfect example is the Ankara miter gauge for the table saw this thing is dead accurate. It’s fantastic to use. I love it, but it has these near washers that you have to constantly tighten as you use it because they wear to keep your settings accurate in this timeslot.
00:20:19:12 – 00:20:44:01
Brian Benham
And one of those is behind the protractor. So you have to take the protractor off to tighten it. And so I drilled a big huge hole in the middle of the protractor right above where that tightening mechanism is. So I don’t have to take it off. And that’s something that if they would have used their own tool for a while and they throw in dogfood for a while, they would have realized, Oh, this is a huge pain in the butt to take this protractor off.
00:20:44:01 – 00:20:48:22
Brian Benham
And they could have just machine that whole when they machine the rest of the protractor Well.
00:20:48:22 – 00:21:09:19
Greg Porter
And I’ll I’ll go back to our software world just a little bit and back to my experience at the Autodesk build space. So interestingly enough they had a lot of their software designers in the same building that we were. I think it was a six storey building. We had the first couple stories for the build space and then above that was all of their development.
00:21:10:08 – 00:21:29:12
Greg Porter
And on the weekends, every once in a while I would go in and they had just a couple rooms open. One was the 3D print lab and one of their software designers was always down there printing stuff. And he told me one day, he said, I’m just going to keep printing things until they tell me I can’t. And I’m like, That sounds like, great.
00:21:29:19 – 00:21:59:10
Greg Porter
But but he would come up with these crazy pieces of code that could what’s the right word? They would generate these crazy three dimensional objects, Right? And at the end of the day is as an architect or as a product designer, there’s maybe not a whole lot of use for that, but he was in there seeing, okay, if I can create the code to create this crazy three dimensional form, can I actually print what I’m doing?
00:21:59:10 – 00:22:26:04
Greg Porter
Like, is there is there a practical way to get it out of the computer and into reality? And it was really interesting to talk to him about what he was doing because he was an incredibly good software developer, mathematician, but he wasn’t a designer and I think a lot of software, a lot of computer related things are designed by people who are software and code writers, but they’re not the target audience for those things.
00:22:26:04 – 00:22:41:18
Greg Porter
So it becomes very important when you are eating your own dogfood to have people on your team that are going to take those things and use them in very practical applications. And I know you’ve had experience with some other software on your end of things as well.
00:22:42:02 – 00:23:04:22
Brian Benham
Yeah, yeah. Some of the software I use is not really practical for 3D printing, but it’s still still serviceable. But on that 3D printing line and prototyping, I want to show you one of my prototypes here. So I have a lot of batteries in my shop for running the lav. Mike and they just get piled up and they roll off the counter.
00:23:05:05 – 00:23:27:03
Brian Benham
So I’m create, I created a battery tray that drops any pull pull you load your battery when they’re charged, you drop them back in the top. Right. So it’s just this rotating thing, right. So when I first before I printed it because as you know, 3D printing takes a long time, like it’s a ten hour print sometimes. So I printed just the bottom L portion, right.
00:23:27:03 – 00:23:48:21
Brian Benham
Just to make sure that the batteries would go in there and it was too tight in here. So I was like, okay, So then I printed it again. So then I had a, I had a third printer and I was sure that I would had it right. So I printed a huge full scale one. And then I realized, okay, so it all works and goes through there, but the weight of the batteries on here pushes it out because now holds too many batteries.
00:23:48:21 – 00:24:09:23
Brian Benham
So then I printed another one with a little tar lip and shorter, but it still pushed it all out. So now then the final version has a much taller lip on it. Yeah. Holds the batteries fine now. So there is like four iterations that I had to go through to make sure that this would print right. So if I was Walmart, I would have stopped at this big one where they all come out the bottom.
00:24:10:11 – 00:24:36:03
Brian Benham
But that was good enough. I wanted to I wanted to make sure I’ll do this on Walmart any day of the week. But anyhow, I wanted to make sure that it worked well because I want to. Not that I’m looking to make money making 3D print files, but but people that follow us often want to buy something that we’ve made and I can sell for a buck or to a 3D print file to someone that wants to support me.
00:24:36:03 – 00:25:10:15
Brian Benham
So that’s the only really reason why I wanted to go all the way to perfect. But, you know, that’s the whole thing. And now this will be in my shop and it won’t frustrate me. I won’t have batteries messed up all over the place. But the real reason why I brought that up is because I went through four iterations to get this right now in the architecture world and you’re building a building and you shared with me a few episodes ago about Frank Gehry that on some of his really big curvy buildings, there is these big gaps that they had a seal with weather stripping or caulking or something.
00:25:10:15 – 00:25:31:05
Brian Benham
And if he had the ability to redo that building, he could solve some of those problems. But those were things he didn’t notice until he had built the building. So in the architect’s world, if you don’t get it right, someone could get hurt or killed or go bankrupt trying to fix a problem. Like how do you guys prototype your designs in the architecture world?
00:25:31:14 – 00:25:59:04
Greg Porter
Well, it’s interesting you ask about that. We have a saying that every building is a prototype. You never design the same building twice. You never photocopy it unless you’re Taco Bell or somebody like that. You know, you’ll you’ll find very, very similar abilities. But even though as their site adapted, they’re slightly different. Everything’s a prototype. So at some point when you look at Frank Gehry’s work or when you look at Morpheus, this is one of my favorite firms.
00:25:59:04 – 00:26:28:15
Greg Porter
If you guys want to see some incredible design. Tom Main and his company Morpheus, this is just does outstanding stuff. And if you look at 25 years ago, what they were doing and then you watch all of the projects that they do, they all build on themselves. So you’re not trying to recreate the wheel every time you’ve got a body of work that is in the safe zone, and that’s going to be 98% of your building design.
00:26:28:15 – 00:26:48:01
Greg Porter
And then you take that 2% and you try and innovate or do something different in that 2% space. And if you’re building a successful in the construction goes, well, you know, okay, that 2% can be added to my body now, right? And the next one you try and step out another 2%. You never want to extend too far.
00:26:48:01 – 00:27:13:00
Greg Porter
That’s how you get into really bad lawsuits. And Frank Gehry has been in tons of them. And Frank Lloyd Wright was in tons of them. You know, all of these guys who are incredibly innovative designers have spent as much time in the courtroom as they have at the drafting board. So there there is a little balance there. But when you look at I visited Tom means Office when I was on sabbatical working out of the build space.
00:27:13:00 – 00:27:33:00
Greg Porter
I flew out to L.A. for a few days, interviewed some of the staff that worked there and talked about their ability to prototype things in house. So they had powder printers. So the first version of a 3D printer that uses a powder, I don’t know what you call it, a powder medium, and it hardens where where they want to.
00:27:33:00 – 00:27:54:12
Greg Porter
And it’s like a 12 by 12 by 12 box is what it is. Z ze printer or something like that is the name of it. But every night they’re printing details, scaled down details. They just say scale to fit 12 by 12 and they print those details. So the next morning they can hold them in their hands and try and see where the problems are.
00:27:54:21 – 00:28:23:19
Greg Porter
They also had a really large milling machine there. They had some sheet metal tools and some other things. And on the side of their building they had a huge grid work where they could hang prototypes of panels and other things off of their building and test them out to see if they’re going to work. So it’s it was scaling those experiments down to to a size that they could work with them and see does this work or will it not work?
00:28:24:00 – 00:28:48:11
Greg Porter
And they avoid tons of mistakes that way. They also require their contractors to do mock ups. So if they’re if you look at the Perot Museum down in I think it’s in Dallas, Texas, fantastic building. It’s all precast concrete, crazy looking panels. And they devised a system where they had several different shapes of form that they could pop in and pop out.
00:28:48:11 – 00:29:08:12
Greg Porter
And they made these panels that are all unique but out of like a Lego type form that they could rearrange for every panel. And their contractor who was, you know, their precast concrete contractor, had to make mockups of it. And then they went down and looked at them and said, we need to improve it this way or we need to change this a little bit this way.
00:29:08:12 – 00:29:33:21
Greg Porter
So the joints come out a little bit smoother. And by the time they had run a handful of panels, they had it figured out. Well, then it was okay. Now we have 450 panels to make for this building skin. And they had already had the recipe that they were able to experiment on. So that’s the way you mitigate your liability and that’s the way you can innovate on a large scale, is you experiment at a small scale.
00:29:34:16 – 00:29:56:01
Brian Benham
In my studio, I have like the 80 20% rule. So the 80 20% rule, if I know that I can confidently build 80% of that project with someone asked me to do something, do that, that 20% I can figure out, but I’m not building anything that is going to put me out of business if I have to call.
00:29:56:01 – 00:30:14:19
Brian Benham
The client says, Hey, we need to revamp this, or I got to give you your money back because it’s not happening. And to date, that has not happened. I’ve always been able to find a path. There’s there’s almost always a path. Sometimes that path does cost me some money to where that project isn’t as profitable as I wish it would have been.
00:30:14:19 – 00:30:37:15
Brian Benham
Or on a couple of projects. I’ve lost a little bit of money, but it’s not anything that’s put me out of business or causing me any huge hardship. So that’s like 80% of the way there. And then the rest of the 20% is is a learning curve also. So then I can reinvest what I just did on the next project to keep going and keep trying to do more and more crazy, crazy projects.
00:30:37:15 – 00:30:54:01
Brian Benham
And then there’s just some things that I’ve said no to that I was like, I don’t think I can do that, but I want to do that. And so they’re in progress in the background, just as my own thing. And someday I if I figure it out, then it’ll become a product that I they can sell or offer.
00:30:54:01 – 00:31:14:22
Greg Porter
I I’ve heard you mention that before, Brian, that some of your experiments that you’ve done on projects have wound up in several other projects. And then I think you even said about one of them is you almost felt bad because, you know, this was the first iteration may not have been as good. And you learn something there, but each one improved afterwards.
00:31:14:22 – 00:31:36:12
Greg Porter
But that’s that’s how, you know, you look through automotive design or anything like that. Everything is iterative and it just slowly gets better. You know, when you look at automotive safety these days with all the airbags and collision detection systems, there’s no way they could have put that together in the sixties. They couldn’t have put that dossier together that says, here’s how we want to protect people.
00:31:36:12 – 00:31:41:24
Greg Porter
They had to take it, you know, start with Ralph Nader in the seatbelts and all of those things. Right.
00:31:41:24 – 00:31:58:06
Brian Benham
And then also, as the car progressed, like the model team might only had like a maximum of 25, 30 mile an hour or whatever. I don’t know the exact numbers, but now, you know, I’ve just driving down the road, you look down, you’re like, Holy crap, I’m going 90 miles an hour. I need a slow to slow down.
00:31:58:06 – 00:32:04:21
Brian Benham
I wasn’t paying attention what the car is capable of doing is also grown. So you’re your safety has to grow along with it.
00:32:04:21 – 00:32:35:20
Greg Porter
Yeah, but I think when I. You know, when I look at any body of work, whether it’s guitar builders or whether it’s furniture designers or building designers or automotive designers, there’s a lot of times in institutional knowledge that people will start with and get to build off of that. But if you’re an individual and you striking out on your own right after school, then you’re starting from square one and everything you do, you know, in the furniture world, it might be, Hey, I learned how to build draw boxes on my on this project.
00:32:36:00 – 00:32:56:13
Greg Porter
So now as my next project comes in my drawer, boxes are going to be better and on and on. But back to kind of our our big framework of our discussion here is eating your own dog food. I think one of the things as makers we get into is it’s a rite of passage to design your shop and your shop furniture and your benches.
00:32:56:19 – 00:33:21:09
Greg Porter
And you just went through that exercise not too long ago. And then you have to live with, you know, the quality or lack of quality. And I think I’ve done the same thing in my shop. You know, I’ve got such a drawers, I’ve got benches that I’ve made, and I live with those every day. And I look at those design decisions and it’s like constantly asking myself, Was that a good design decision or a bad design decision?
00:33:21:17 – 00:33:32:16
Greg Porter
And then as I’m working on things for customers or the products that we’re making for skyscraper guitars, I’m I’m able to answer the question, can I do it better? And if so, how?
00:33:32:22 – 00:34:00:03
Brian Benham
Yeah. So then after you live with things, you start to realize how things wear and tear and start to break down. Like I have built a whole bunch of doors for clients over the years, and some of them are outdoor doors, and I’m always worried about how well that’s going to perform against the elements, what kind of finish is going to perform, because every clear finish you put on an exterior project inevitably is going to need to be sanded and redone.
00:34:00:11 – 00:34:15:08
Brian Benham
And that’s not a thing that I want to get into. It’s like if one of my clients called me and asked me if I would refinish the project, of course I’m going to do it for them because I want to maintain that client relationship. But if someone that’s not my client calls me, I’m like that now. Sorry, that’s not what I do.
00:34:15:17 – 00:34:40:20
Brian Benham
So because refinishing is miserable work. Oh yeah. So I want the best finish. So I just now built a door for my own house, and it’s a southern facing door. So we’re at Where am I on? I’m at 7200 feet above sea level in Colorado, as close to the sun as you can get and still breathe oxygen just about here.
00:34:42:09 – 00:35:04:16
Brian Benham
So it’s super close. The sun and then the temperature swings are ridiculous at night it gets down into the the negative sometimes here. And then when I say negative, that’s negative Fahrenheit, I realize Celsius negative isn’t that big of a deal. And then and then during the day, that sun beating on the doors, that doors all of a sudden now is 70, 80 degrees.
00:35:05:03 – 00:35:34:16
Brian Benham
And it’s walnut and cherry. And it’s only been there for two weeks now. And the outside cherry is way noticeably more darker than the inside Cherry. But the finish still looks great. So I’m hoping that this finish I used, I use a finish that I’ve never used before because this is part of that like 80, 20%, like on my own project, it can be 99 or it could be like 50% there and 50% less experiment.
00:35:34:16 – 00:35:43:23
Brian Benham
So it’s a new finish I’ve never used before and I’m hoping it will really withstand the test of time so I can put my mind at ease for future projects.
00:35:44:07 – 00:35:48:12
Greg Porter
D Do you care to share what finish that is or do you want to keep it a secret for now?
00:35:48:12 – 00:36:11:03
Brian Benham
Oh no. Another past share. I’ll put I’ll put it in the show notes what it actually is because I don’t remember the name of it because a Sherwin-Williams product and their products are numbers. So it’s the number, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what it is, is it’s a oil based, catalyzed polyurethane, or you have to put a catalyst in it to set it off.
00:36:11:03 – 00:36:40:14
Brian Benham
And it’s a three part deal. So the first coat is a boost your barrier. So it goes down clear and it’s really thin like it was so thin. I was, I, I well, that’s, that’s another story for for a what happened in the finishing room. But it was so thin, I had so much crazy overspray that I had to rethink how I was going to spread, really dial down my hair and I should have played with it some more before I went right to the door, which is another lesson.
00:36:40:21 – 00:36:42:06
Brian Benham
Test test pieces.
00:36:42:07 – 00:36:43:12
Greg Porter
House panels. Yeah.
00:36:43:13 – 00:36:44:03
Brian Benham
Yes. Panels.
00:36:44:03 – 00:36:48:03
Greg Porter
Before go, I’ve learned that lesson. No fewer than 20 times for the record.
00:36:48:09 – 00:37:06:00
Brian Benham
But we were filming for a wood whisper Guild project and I had the videographer only for a few days, so I didn’t have a lot of time to play with this new finish. The first time I open the can and we hit record and where we go. So. So yeah, there’s a whole lot of overspray that I did not expect.
00:37:06:00 – 00:37:33:03
Brian Benham
The is so thin, but I think it’s so thin because it’s supposed to soak into the wood fibers and harden them up to prevent moisture from getting in. And then there’s a sealer that goes over the top of it and then I put two coats of top of the top coat over the top of that. So it’s a moisture barrier, a sealer which I think is good adhesion and fills in a lot of the pores and adds, you know, protects that moisture barrier from moves and things.
00:37:33:03 – 00:37:42:13
Brian Benham
And then the topcoat has a U.V. inhibitor in it as well. And it’s supposed to be like this rock solid best finish out there for exterior work.
00:37:42:16 – 00:37:59:04
Greg Porter
I don’t I don’t want to get into a huge conversation about finishes, but the one thing I do know is when you get into the two part catalyzed truly catalyzed not pre catalyzed but catalyzed finishes, that’s the durability goes up exponentially, actually.
00:37:59:04 – 00:38:16:03
Brian Benham
Yes. Huge. Yeah. Like people don’t realize that when they get their pre cat lacquer and they pop up in the can they spread spray their gun are baby. I’m not using that phrase right I think Sherwin-Williams when they say precast you have to catalyze it but I don’t know they’re they have weird weird terminology we but.
00:38:16:18 – 00:38:33:04
Greg Porter
We use a we use a pre cat pre catalyzed. I think it’s an epoxy from Sherwin-Williams and it’s it’s a one part you open the can you spray it it only has so long of a shelf life and that that’s my experience with it but we don’t use a lot of clippers from them.
00:38:33:11 – 00:38:54:09
Brian Benham
Yeah. So yeah. Anyways but whatever it is out of the can where it’s already ready to go and it has all the catalysts in it, you spray it and, and a few months later it’s all scratched up. Where you at. You buy the, the lack of that. You have to buy the catalyst separately to put in there. And that stuff is like like you could drag it down the sidewalk before you got to worry about it.
00:38:54:09 – 00:39:04:08
Greg Porter
I, I’ve always said that if you, if you use the finishes that the pirates use and you can tell which ones the pirates use because it has their skull and crossbones on it, that’s the best ones.
00:39:04:17 – 00:39:29:10
Brian Benham
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve really I’m a huge proponent for saving the environment. I want my grandkids and great grandkids to live a wonderful life in the hiking in the beautiful mountains of Colorado and all the waterfalls and breathe clean air and have good, wholesome food to eat. But I’m really concerned about all the laws that are clamping down on prohibiting the manufacture of high velocities.
00:39:29:19 – 00:39:43:13
Brian Benham
It seems like there’s a better way to go about it, that we could figure out how to filter the VRC out opposed to just saying let’s not use it because as someone who warrants their work, I want that strong, durable finish.
00:39:43:23 – 00:40:09:03
Greg Porter
Yeah, and well, I know a lot of that. And again, I think we could get into a 20 hour long discussion about that stuff. But some of the what’s the word I’m looking for, some of the solvents for where the issue is in in order to get the the good products spreadable or brush it, you have to put those really, really harsh solvents in there.
00:40:09:03 – 00:40:27:00
Greg Porter
And that’s where the viruses are. That’s the solvents cooking out. And I don’t know, I’m holding out hope that some chemist somewhere is going to find the magic solvent that’s going to save. And, you know, we have waterborne paints and that’s what that’s all about, is it’s a waterborne solvent. But yeah, even.
00:40:27:05 – 00:40:28:09
Brian Benham
Even they as well though.
00:40:28:17 – 00:40:50:03
Greg Porter
Well, they don’t and even in I’m very familiar with the automotive side of things, even if you’re using a waterborne paint when it comes to the clear topcoat, it’s still solvent based. It’s not a waterborne it’s still a two part ISO and it’s a different animal. So I don’t know, again, I think we could go on for hours.
00:40:50:03 – 00:40:52:14
Greg Porter
Yeah. In terms of finishes, maybe.
00:40:52:14 – 00:40:54:21
Brian Benham
We’ll have to have a finishing episode one day.
00:40:55:05 – 00:41:15:16
Greg Porter
We may, but but going back to eating your own dog food, that’s been something that I’ve thought for years on the guitar side of things is as somebody who’s making guitars that other people are going to play, you have to test your finishes out and you have to use those finishes on things that you have in your hands every single day.
00:41:15:24 – 00:41:34:14
Greg Porter
Because when somebody says, How long is this going to last? You have to be able to tell them in real, real world terms, Hey, I’ve had this guitar or I’ve had this car part or I’ve had this thing that I sprayed 15 years ago. Take a look at it. The gloss hasn’t back. It still looks like the day it was sprayed and buffed.
00:41:34:23 – 00:41:43:17
Greg Porter
And I think that’s incredibly important when you can hold your product up and say, this is how well it’s going to hold up when I do one for you.
00:41:44:01 – 00:42:04:22
Brian Benham
Yeah, yeah. We could get into all kinds of things that now that I’ve been building custom furniture for 12 years now and, and thankfully I’ve been able to maintain a really good relationship with my clients over this 12 years, and they have invited me back a decade or half a decade later to build more stuff. And so I get to see my products in their house.
00:42:05:07 – 00:42:20:19
Brian Benham
And there’s some times where I’m like, Oh, I mean, I that didn’t age as well as I’d hoped. And they’re, they’re sometimes like, yeah, that, that was it. And I kept track of all the products that I’ve used over the years. So I know what Finish did not wear well and what finished did and and glues too.
00:42:21:12 – 00:42:40:16
Greg Porter
I’ve I’ve always thought that I’ve said it this way art has a life span and there are all these people who work in museums and they restore pieces of art. And I’ve always thought that was a complete line of B.S. Number one, if you’re not the original artist, you shouldn’t be touching the surface and changing it in any way, shape or form.
00:42:40:16 – 00:43:06:05
Greg Porter
But the reality is there’s a life span to everything. And when we’re dead and gone and the dinosaurs have returned to take back over the earth, none of the things that we made will will be left behind and in the form that we made them and when you explain that to clients that there there is there’s a horizon for this piece of furniture or this guitar or this building.
00:43:06:05 – 00:43:26:04
Greg Porter
And we we designed to about an 80 year horizon for our buildings and explaining to somebody that in 80 years you’re going to have to do some major things if you want this building to continue to be viable. So it drops off in terms of a value and in in terms of performance over the course of those 80 years.
00:43:26:04 – 00:43:45:11
Greg Porter
And some some pieces of a building may only last ten or 15 years when you’re talking about roofing or mechanical systems or some of those things and other parts of the building will last the entire lifespan of the building and probably beyond with a little bit of freshening up. But the Chinese do a really interesting thing with their temples every so many years.
00:43:45:11 – 00:44:11:06
Greg Porter
And I want to say it’s every hundred years, and I’m not an expert in that category, but their temples are made to be deconstructed, inspected and reassembled. And I think the same thing, you know, when you look at automobiles, how long does a paint job lasts on a car? 20 years, maybe out in the sun, and then it’s time to sand it down and either respray the color and refinish it or just say in the clear off and refinish it.
00:44:11:14 – 00:44:32:24
Greg Porter
But when we look at furniture and other things that we make in our shops, I think there’s a reasonable life span for some of those things where, you know what, this might last 15 or 20 years in this form, but it the 15 or 20 year mark, maybe we should take a look at it re glue the drawers and replace the slides and look at the top and think, you know, maybe we need to refinish it.
00:44:32:24 – 00:44:47:07
Greg Porter
And you know as well as I do, there are antique restorers out there. And that’s why because that antique has come to the end of its useful lifespan in that form and it needs to be touched up and redone. And I think that’s a reasonable thing to tell people.
00:44:47:16 – 00:45:09:24
Brian Benham
Yeah. And not just from not just from a restored standpoint, just a repair standpoint, because you never know. There’s been some things where I have righted the data and stuck a thing in there and then glued it up and there’s no way to replace that thing that’s in that data because I glued it up with a glue that a modern glue, not like a high glue that you can release.
00:45:09:24 – 00:45:30:17
Brian Benham
So there’s no way that that’s coming out of there to be repaired. You’ve got to really plan that out in your in your thing of like if, if your client calls you up, how are you going to repair that or does it need to be repaired? What what is your liability of trapping something inside a data or making it so you can’t access it once it’s installed somewhere?
00:45:31:11 – 00:45:53:17
Greg Porter
I, I heard a guitar repair technician talking about acoustic guitars one day and he was explaining that the day you build it, it starts decaying over the course of so many years. And in the whole premise of his, his rant was that somebody had brought him a guitar that was 60 years old and wanted it to play like a brand new guitar.
00:45:53:18 – 00:46:11:05
Greg Porter
And he said, You’ve got a birdhouse here. That’s that’s all this guitar is useful for. It is at the end of its life. And there’s there’s no real way to go in and repair this thing and there’s no reason to. They make new ones go buy a new one. And it was an interesting way to look at life spans.
00:46:11:05 – 00:46:36:17
Greg Porter
But again, with our topic being eating your own dog food, I think understanding the things you make, what their life spans are, can be an incredibly valuable thing to your customers and to be able to say confidently, you know, this is going to give you 20 years of service. And I think when people are at the point in their life where they can afford nice things, they start to look in, you know, hey, I’m 50 years old.
00:46:36:17 – 00:46:52:20
Greg Porter
That’s going to last me till I’m 70. I’ll be ready for the funny farm, by the way. And so, yeah, this is going to be a good investment for me. And the next person can worry about its continued life or whether or not they want to put it in the dumpster with other things.
00:46:52:20 – 00:47:17:10
Brian Benham
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a couple of pieces. I did a like an art wine cart for a mining engineer and his son came and looked at that and he and he’s like, Would you die? I don’t care what you put your will. I’m coming to get that. Because he thought it was the coolest thing and wants it. And so I was like, okay, well, did I build that thing to last two generations at least?
00:47:17:16 – 00:47:58:16
Greg Porter
I think one other interesting thing just to mention here, because I think it’s I think it’s relevant in this conversation. My one of my former bosses lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house built in, built in. I think it was built from in 61. It was finished. Frank died in 58, 59 or something like that. They actually started construction of the house after Frank had passed away, but Frank designed it prior to his passing and the house is filled with authentic Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and lamps and tables, desks, beds, and the whole house is furnished with Frank Lloyd Wright furniture, and it’s not out of a catalog.
00:47:58:16 – 00:48:21:21
Greg Porter
It was the real stuff when I was working for. So this would have been back in the late nineties. One of the things that I did was help repair some of that old furniture because there were things wrong with it. You know, this is again back to living that life is this furniture was used on a daily basis and he had two young kids that were high school age that were really tough on things.
00:48:21:21 – 00:48:47:03
Greg Porter
And and they didn’t understand that this furniture was you couldn’t replace it. There’s there’s no way to to replace it. So you had to go in and repair those things. But that was some interesting work. It was very minor stuff. It wasn’t anything major. It was just minor things. But but thinking about how to keep those pieces functional over time was was an interesting, interesting sort of set of problems to deal with.
00:48:47:13 – 00:49:12:10
Brian Benham
So another side tangent here, this is really more of a curiosity thing, but there are all kinds of architects in history that designed the building and the furniture to go in it. In today’s world, I don’t know that there’s anybody that does that anymore. Do you do you know of any architects that that still design the building and the furniture to go in it?
00:49:12:20 – 00:49:34:18
Greg Porter
Yeah. There there are some people I would tell you a lot of them, if you’re looking on the residential side of things, you see a lot of people who do the Craftsman style homes, the green and green, if you will, and they will design all the built ins, they will design the chairs. And a lot of it is a riff on something that’s already existing.
00:49:34:18 – 00:49:58:16
Greg Porter
It’s it’s rarely something that’s completely just out of the blue, new, but back to back to Morpheus and Tom Main. Tom has designed several pieces of furniture over the years, and you see those in his buildings, But it’s a kit of parts. It’s not special furniture for this particular building. It’s here’s some of the furniture I designed. It’s going to be in this building.
00:49:58:16 – 00:50:32:11
Greg Porter
And Frank did it that way overall. So did it that way. Gosh, there’s there’s several others over the course of history, like for Boosie, A did I don’t know if you’re familiar with Corb, but he had several lounge chairs that are extraordinarily famous and copied. Mies van der Rohe would be another one. Yeah, but they they did. They had they had probably half a dozen to a dozen pieces and those pieces found their way into several different buildings.
00:50:32:11 – 00:51:06:21
Greg Porter
But I would say, well, one of my professors, Dan Rock Hill, is one of those guys who has designed furniture and is it’s wound up in several of his residential projects over the years. And he does design custom furniture, whether that’s wardrobes for people or chairs or dining room pieces he does do. Some of that is probably not I don’t know that I’ve seen his projects where every single piece of furniture was his, but I have seen it where the living room is all done by him.
00:51:06:21 – 00:51:14:07
Greg Porter
And then it’s up to you to furnish your bedrooms or things like that. But that’s a that is a tall order. Yeah. To do that.
00:51:14:18 – 00:51:38:17
Brian Benham
I the, the design of the house that I shared with you just before we hit record, I designed that house based off a front door design that I did for a client. And so then I designed that the front door design was designed to fit the decor of the house that I designed it for. But the outside architecture didn’t fit the design of the door.
00:51:38:17 – 00:51:58:23
Brian Benham
So it was all for the inside because it was a remodel project. And so then I was like, okay, well, I want to design a house that actually fits that design of the door. The exterior. And so that’s how I came up with that angled modular modern design. And then as I was designing, I started thinking like, okay, well I could do some of those same angles in the dining table.
00:51:58:23 – 00:52:23:23
Brian Benham
And then now a medicine cabinet with a mirror can be part of that. And then the staircases could have some of that same thing. And so, of course, I don’t have the resources to build this house or necessarily the time to fully flesh out that entire house with all that furniture, because just just getting that general house design down was puts an incredible amount of work, especially for someone that’s not a trained architect.
00:52:24:15 – 00:52:53:01
Greg Porter
Yeah. And I mean, I think that’s why you see, so often designers will repeat those pieces of furniture because doing it all in one project from scratch is a ton of work. Yeah, if you can build that kit of parts and repeat them over and over or riff on a theme. So this is version one, This is version B and in progress, those things you can, you can make those incremental improvements.
00:52:53:01 – 00:53:13:05
Greg Porter
And that’s so much easier than starting from scratch and, and coming up with a furniture design to go with your house. I know, you know, you look in a lot of Frank’s work, Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, and I think one of his things that I’ve seen several times is he would have I don’t know if I would call them Mackintosh style chairs.
00:53:13:05 – 00:53:35:13
Greg Porter
They were Frank Lloyd Wright design, but they had a very high back on them. You saw those in a lot of dining rooms. And the dining room table, on the other hand, might be just for that house. So That was his way of customizing that furniture set is whether it’s a coffee table or a dining room table or something else is is that you would adapt it to that house.
00:53:35:13 – 00:53:57:07
Greg Porter
And it was just based on, you know, what kind of ornamentation was in the house, if it was a usonian house or oh gosh, I can’t remember all the Frank Lloyd Wright phases, but they were they were very different from one another. And you could tell by the furniture that was in it what period of his design, his, I don’t know, design progress.
00:53:57:07 – 00:54:09:11
Greg Porter
I don’t know what you call it, but his different phases of design. So, yeah, that was that was how he did. It was just incrementally change one piece or two pieces within the house and then kind of repeat all the others.
00:54:09:14 – 00:54:30:13
Brian Benham
And then continue to iterate. And I think that’s kind of how you also get a style. Again, if you keep iterating on it and you you pick out your favorite pieces or your favorite design elements and iterate on those and that just kind of becomes your style. But yeah, Frank Lloyd Wright went really just like beautiful Craftsman bungalow things to brutalism concrete stuff.
00:54:30:13 – 00:54:40:17
Brian Benham
And I and I’m thinking about it. I wonder if I don’t ever recall ever seeing any furniture designed in his last brutalism concrete houses. Where was there?
00:54:41:03 – 00:54:43:17
Greg Porter
You’d be surprised. Yeah, I think.
00:54:43:17 – 00:54:45:08
Brian Benham
To go do some research on that.
00:54:45:08 – 00:55:06:14
Greg Porter
Interestingly enough, when you when you look at a lot of his work, he always had a studio, you know, So it was Frank driving the car. There were a lot of people riding along with him and so he had some horsepower to do those things. But he also had Taliesin and Taliesin West, which were his schools. So he had students that had to work on things too.
00:55:06:23 – 00:55:28:06
Greg Porter
So he had almost an unending amount of horsepower to produce these custom things. And so I am I’m fairly certain I’m not a Frank Lloyd Wright expert by any stretch. I would tell you that a lot of people think, Oh, you’re an architect. You’ve got to be this huge Frank Lloyd Wright fan. I appreciate his work, but he wasn’t my favorite architect.
00:55:28:07 – 00:55:49:02
Greg Porter
He never has been. But I really appreciate the level of effort he went to and the the trail that he broke for all of the other architects in the world to really get in deeper into design and but I think there’s other people who who’ve done equally interesting and more technical work than Frank said.
00:55:49:14 – 00:55:54:01
Brian Benham
The green and green brothers would be up there. I would I would say.
00:55:54:03 – 00:56:14:00
Greg Porter
Oh, yeah, them and, you know, all the all the modern guys that I really follow who have done just some groundbreaking things. And anyway, I could go on for hours about that kind of stuff. And in fact, I think we’ve, we’ve probably been on here just longer than an hour. I don’t know if you want to wrap up, Brian.
00:56:14:07 – 00:56:21:10
Brian Benham
You got you have any last design thoughts on eating your own dog food you want to throw out there?
00:56:21:10 – 00:56:52:05
Greg Porter
I do. I think it’s incredibly important to be a slave to your to your work. And if it doesn’t work for you, it’s not going to work for someone else. I mean, in weird sorts of ways it might if it doesn’t fit your hands, but it might fit somebody with smaller hands. But if if something that you design really doesn’t doesn’t work to a level where you’re like, yes, I would use my designed thing, my designed object over anyone else’s any day of the that.
00:56:52:05 – 00:57:11:18
Greg Porter
I think you have to revisit why you did or how you came up with your design and say, why haven’t you worked more on it and brought it to that point where it is your number one, your favorite, the one that you always pick up or the desk that you always sit at, or the chair that you sit in or the space in your house that you want to use.
00:57:11:22 – 00:57:17:01
Greg Porter
Most often I think those are really important things. Live living with your own designs.
00:57:17:13 – 00:57:49:07
Brian Benham
Yeah. And in today’s world where it seems like everything is designed to be the just a minimum viable product, like everything is so cheap just to throw Wal-Mart under the bus for more time. You walk through Mart and everything is just so thin, plastic so cheap that I think if you’re in the design world and you’re actively designing things that there is a market for higher end products, that there is a market for things that are really well done.
00:57:49:07 – 00:58:12:12
Brian Benham
And don’t be afraid to revise it and old design and try to make it better, not cheaper. I think my last my last example of a product that frustrates me is the Band-Aid packaging. I like. If you anybody that is a maker knows that your dominant hand is trying to kill your non-dominant hand, you’re going to jam something into a screwdriver.
00:58:12:12 – 00:58:39:12
Brian Benham
You’re going to slip with a knife or a chisel and slice your non-dominant hand like my left thumb. I’m surprised it’s still here. This thing has got to be the toughest thing in the world because it has survived my right hand from trying to chop it off. Because every cut, every time I get a cut, it’s on my left thumb and when you go to get a Band-Aid to put on there so you don’t bleed all over your work is these two tiny little flaps that you have to try to pull apart to open the Band-Aid?
00:58:39:21 – 00:59:02:24
Brian Benham
This if you are working for Johnson and Johnson, you listen to this podcast, please redesign the packaging so you can open it with one hand or buy a bite, a big flap with your teeth and open it up so that way you can not bleed. All of your work can very easily use it and not be frustrated or in great amount of pain trying to open a Band-Aid with your cut thumb.
00:59:02:24 – 00:59:04:03
Brian Benham
So yeah, maybe.
00:59:04:03 – 00:59:08:15
Greg Porter
This is our next million dollar idea. Brian, If we can redesign the Band-Aid.
00:59:08:21 – 00:59:17:18
Brian Benham
Yeah, redesign, Band-Aid. And also condoms. I have a great idea for condoms, but we should save that for another another episode.
00:59:18:15 – 00:59:31:18
Greg Porter
All right, that sounds good. Well, we’ll wrap it up here. I’m Greg Porter. You can find my website at Skyscraper Guitars dot com or Greg’s Garage Kcom.
00:59:31:24 – 01:02:10:23
Brian Benham
Right. And I’m Brian Benham. You can find all my socials and YouTube at Brian Benham icon. And if you have any question about where to find all of our stuff, just you’re listening to the Makers Quest podcast. The Maker’s Quest dot com is our website and you can find all our show notes there. Thanks for listening.
