Forgive me St. Roy, for I have used a spreadsheet to do woodworking calculations.

I was trying to figure out the dog hole spacing on my workbench. Most guides say that they should be somewhere in the neighborhood of six inches apart, but my main concern was spacing them out in such a way that I’d have them symmetric on both ends of the bench, with a nice distance for each end.

After using “dc” to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I got to thinking, well, you know, instead of looking at these numbers one at a time, why don’t I pull up the openoffice spreadsheet and see everything at once?

Column A is the length of the bench, B is the spacing between dog hole centers, C is the number of spaces between dog holes (one less than the total number of dog holes), and D is the distance between the end and the first dog hole center. I wanted about two inches, and row 5, with six and a half inches between dog holes, purports to have exactly that.

So I mocked it up on the bench, and it seems dead on. Drat it. You always want the computer to be wrong, because it’s so stupid.

Oh yeah. And I did the second oil finish application the other day. Looks good now.