Comment by thechao
3 hours ago
I had a cabinet built and the guy doing the work pointed out that the human eye is really great at detecting line-line deviation; but, building to & correcting for that deviation requires working across the whole surface. He was making an area-effort to linear-quality argument. He said every time you halved the gap, it quadrupled the effort. Also, he said that was what saw-dust & glue were for.
One thing I’ve learned over decades of home/DIY projects is it’s usually better to intentionally target a small overlap/reveal rather than trying to have two materials match perfectly.
If you have a piece of door trim that exactly matches the piece behind, any imperfections or subsequent wood movement will be unsightly. If you instead target a 1/4” reveal, imperfections and slight wood movement are wildly less noticeable.
This is “build so the 1/32” imperfection/movement doesn’t matter at all” rather than trying to halve or quarter it. (If you can make something monolithic after attaching, such as a plaster wall, you don't have to do this, but wood furniture and trim often has these intentional offsets.)