Amen. Never becoming complacent around familiar tools is the key. Daily exposure can reduce the sense of danger (just think of how comfortable we are in automobiles, and they are hellishly dangerous things).

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Geoffrey Ellis Flutes

Complacency with procedures is equally bad.

Hmmm...not sure I get the distinction. Can you elaborate? For me, the tools and the procedures in using them are one and the same in practice. The tool is not a danger unless used to engage in a procedure.

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Geoffrey Ellis Flutes

Indeed. I have a friend who used to make good money changing light bulbs on radio towers in Alaska. Really good money. One day, three hundred feet up a tower in a twenty below zero gale, he realized he wasn't scared anymore. He quit the next day.

One good example is: "I've looked back there 1,000 times and never found anything wrong." But on the 1,001st time, something was wrong. Sometimes we get so used to doing something a certain way that we think we could do it in our sleep. This can also cause someone to miss a critical recent revision to procedure or overlook a step after returning from a break. Granted, these aren't terribly pertinent to flutemaking, but complacency is never a good thing. William's friend who climbed radio towers was probably wise to quit when he realized he was no longer scared; at that point, complacency could have kicked in at any time.

In these cases, we might not need to carry tools, but we still use valuable tools: our eyes, ears, hands, brains, and knowledge bases.

Okay, I'm with you now

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Geoffrey Ellis Flutes