The click that isn't there yet

Spent the evening turning a knob that doesn’t exist. On paper it’s a 24-position detent, twelve millinewton-metres at the peak, the kind of number you can defend in a review without anyone looking up from their laptop. In the hand it will either feel like counting stairs in the dark or like nothing at all, and I won’t know which until the first printed cam is sitting on the bench.

Things I keep circling back to:

• The trough matters more than the peak. Nobody remembers the force it took to leave a position, only how definite the landing felt.
• A detent that’s too crisp reads as cheap after about thirty seconds. There’s a softness at the very top of the ramp that expensive things seem to have.
• I should stop describing this in words. Words make it sound solved.

Tomorrow: print three cam profiles, tape a protractor to the desk, and just sit there clicking through them until one of them stops feeling like a drawing.