Ah, Nakashima! Good quote from an extraordinary artist, Richard!
What you say about frame-building here reminds me of one of my favorite poems. You write:
the time sink is the assembly process - all the tasks needed to get the tubes into and out of fixtures so that what is yielded is frame that has the fewest possible in-born stresses and arrives "here" straight in its finished state, rather than wrestled into precision alignment.
Which reminds me of what Baptiste, the carver of ax-helves, explains in Robert Frost's "The Ax-Helve":
He liked to have it slender as a whipstock, Free from the least knot, equal to the strain Of bending like a sword across the knee. He showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. And there its strength lay For the hard work.
(I think Mr. Nakashima would approve of Baptiste.)
I sure would like to see one of Nakashima's Peace Tables in person. . . .
Nath Dresser
Spring Green, WI