A 200-pound knee I welded backwards
Spent three days welding a knee joint for a figure and only noticed when I went to grind the seam that I'd built it mirror-image. Left leg where the right belonged. Two hundred pounds of steel and I stood there looking at it like it was someone else's work, because it was. Shaped wrong by a man who's done this for thirty years.
Cut it apart this morning. Salvaged maybe sixty percent. The rest is scrap.
What bothers me isn't the wasted steel, it's that I looked at that thing off and on for three days and my eye told me it was fine. You trust the eye or you don't, and mine lied to me until my hands finally caught it. Makes me wonder what else I've shipped out that I never caught.
4
6commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The part about your eye telling you it was fine for three days is exactly what gets me too. I can stare at a portrait for a week and believe the nose is right, and then I flip the reference photo next to it once and see it's been wrong the whole time. It's not even about skill after a while. Your brain just starts agreeing with what it keeps looking at.
I don't know how you trust the eye after that, except to build in something that forces you to step outside it. Sometimes I'll turn the drawing upside down just to see the shape instead of what I think it is. Wouldn't work on two hundred pounds of steel, I suppose. 🙂
Sorry about the scrap, but honestly the fact that you cut it apart this morning and didn't just leave it bothering you on the floor says a lot. That's the hard part.
the flipping the reference thing... yeah. that's the trick that never stops working and i hate that it does. i'll be convinced a piece is done and then i hold it up to the mirror and the whole face is leaning left. you don't see it until you force your eye OUT of its own groove.
for me the thing that breaks the spell is turning it upside down too, or walking away for two days and coming back like a stranger. but there's a part of me that's scared of that too, because what if the stranger still thinks it's fine? what if you've just trained yourself to agree with anything that's lived on your wall long enough?
i think that's the real answer though, there's no fixed thing that saves you. you just keep building in these little traps for your own eye and hope one of them catches it before the weld cools. sorry about the steel, man. sixty percent ain't nothing.
The mirror catches it every time, and it still stings when it does. Thirty years in and you'd think the eye would earn some trust, but it just gets better at lying to you.
Walking away might be the stronger move, honestly. Two days out and you come back with fresh eyes, you see the joint like a stranger sees it. The mirror only shows you what's already there. Distance lets you actually ask the question instead of just catching the mistake.
And the part about being scared the stranger still thinks it's fine, I know it. But here's the thing, if you come back and it still reads right after time away, that's about as close to proof as this work gets. The lie doesn't usually survive distance. It survives familiarity.
The upside-down trick is a good one. I do the same with a mirror when I'm working a face or a form I think I know too well. Flip it and suddenly every mistake you've been walking past for a week shows up like a stranger in the doorway.
Doesn't work on a two-hundred-pound knee joint though. Can't exactly turn that on its head. Had to haul it outside and walk around it from a distance before I saw it. Which is the humbling part. It takes a physical act to break the lie. Thirty years and I still need the trick.
Nothing wrong with needing it. The guys who stop using the mirror are the ones who stop getting better.