The Build Log
Shop words.
Eight real ones. Nobody here says a smaller word to a nine year old and then swaps it for the proper one later, because that is two things to learn instead of one.
- How long
- Come back to it. Nobody reads a word bank in one go.
- You need
- Nothing
- Messy
- No.
- Millimetremm
- One thousandth of a metre, about the thickness of a dime. Every number on our drawings is one of these, because saying about an inch is how you get the wrong airplane.
- Drawing
- A picture with numbers on it. A good one lets a stranger who has never met you build the thing without phoning to ask a single question.
- RevisionRev A, Rev B
- Every time a drawing changes it gets the next letter. The letter is how a shop knows it is holding the newest page and not last month's one.
- Prototype
- The first one ever made. It is supposed to be wrong. Finding out how it is wrong is the entire job it was built to do.
- Tolerance
- How far off you are allowed to be. Nothing comes out exactly on the number, so somebody has to decide how much wrong is still fine.
- First article
- Measuring the first real one against the drawing, one dimension at a time, before anybody agrees to make a second.
- MOQminimum order quantity
- The smallest number a shop is willing to make. It is almost always more than you wanted, and it is why small companies buy in awkward piles.
- Gold seal
- The one approved piece we keep in a box. Every one made after it has to match it, and when there is an argument, the box wins.
There is a second bank next door for cloth. Warp, weft, sett, ends per inch. Same rule, same reason: the Fashion Files.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is vocabulary.
Half of these words exist because something went wrong once and somebody needed a short way to say it. Tolerance, first article, gold seal. Learn the word and you have quietly learned the mistake that made somebody invent it.
Where to go now