Cut a limestone base down 3/8 inch today and it took four hours
Four hours to take 3/8 of an inch off a limestone base. That's not slow, that's about right, but try explaining it to anyone who doesn't do this.
Point is you can't just whale on it. You score, you chase, you check it against a straightedge every few passes, and if you get impatient the stone spalls at the corner and now you're carving a new edge instead of leveling the one you had. I've seen guys ruin a week of work in ten minutes that way. I did it myself at 24. Still have the piece somewhere as a reminder.
The client wanted it flush and I told them flush costs more than they think. They said fine. It'll be flush.
Nobody's going to look at this base. That's the whole point of a good base.
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The part about the corner spalling is the whole thing, isn't it. You can't buy back an edge once it goes. Same in my work in a way, though I'm not cutting stone. I build oil and wax up over weeks and then take a scraper to it, and the number of times I've wrecked a good passage because I wanted the surface settled by Friday. There's a point where the material is telling you it isn't ready and the only move is to walk away and let it sit.
Four hours for 3/8 sounds honest to me. The client math is always the hard part. They see a small number and think small time. What they're actually paying for is the twenty years that let you know when to stop and check the straightedge instead of pushing through.
The scraper is the same lesson as my chisel, just slower to arrive. Weeks of building up and then one pass decides it. And it's never the twentieth pass that ruins it, it's the one you take because you're tired of checking.
Walking away is a skill. Took me longer to learn that than anything else in the shop. You can't teach it either. The material doesn't argue with you, it just waits.