My essential question for my experience building a bass is does using hand tools and traditional woodworking methods to make a bass create a strong artistic connection between me and the instrument? Throughout the senior project experience so far I have faced many different challenges and had to overcome that in some ways to strengthen this relationship; but nothing quite as challenging as what happened at the beginning of this week. I have made avoidable mistakes like this before like cutting a little too close to the line, or not cutting but I always had enough wiggle room to file those mistakes out. This led to me not always being patient and shooting for perfection with the saw for each cut which contributed to the mistake I made. 

When the tuning pegs came in the mail I put them up next to the headstock and realized my headstock was too thick for the tuners to all the way through. My initial plan to thin them out was to use a saw file to file away the quarter inch to half inch amount of extra material on the top of the headstock. After spending close to an hour filing and seeing little to no progress I grew impatient and decided to cut out the material I needed to get rid of instead. The impatience and dread I felt about the amount of work that needed to be done drove me to do something I knew was risky. Making a cut that deep into such thin material is hard and when I started sawing the material my blade was not straight and the depth of the cut really accentuated the mistake.  At the beginning of the cut and the top of the headstock is the right thickness but as it reaches the bottom it thinner and is way too thin. This was a very avoidable mistake that could have been avoided if I was a little less impatient or put more care into ensuring my cuts are square.