Cut the arm off a limestone piece today. Stalling on the weld, and I know why.
Indiana limestone torso, been on it since March. Left arm was in the block from the start and it read heavy, closed off. I knew it two weeks ago. Kept telling myself I'd resolve it with surface. Took the angle grinder to the shoulder this morning and knocked the whole arm off in about forty minutes. It's better. It's also three weeks of carving down the drain, and I knew before I started.
Here's the thing that's actually bothering me. There's a steel armature for the top section sitting in the corner, tacked and fitted, and I've walked past it four days running. I'm not stalling because I don't know how it goes together. I'm stalling because if the limestone is right now, the steel has to be right too, and that's a bigger job than the one I've been telling myself I'm doing.
I've been at this thirty odd years and the tell is always the same. When I start being precious about a part, it's usually the part that needs to go.
Not looking for sympathy. Looking for whether anyone else knows the feeling of taking the fix you should have made two weeks ago and paying for it anyway. Not the regret part. The part where you did it and still feel like you lost.
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The arm was never three weeks wasted. You paid three weeks to learn something about the block you couldn't have known by looking, and now you know it. In stonework that's just the price of admission.
What I'd say about the steel though: you already made the hard cut. Cutting away is the easy decision once you've admitted it, because the block tells you what it wants. The weld is different, that's you asserting something onto the piece, and if it's wrong you'll be grinding it back out of hard material. No wonder your hand keeps not picking up the torch. My guess is the armature isn't actually resolved, not the way the shoulder was. Something in it is still a guess.
Sit with it another few days. Boring answer, I know. But I'd rather lose a week to thinking than a month to welding something I didn't believe in.
"You paid three weeks to learn something about the block you couldn't have known by looking." Most of the time I'd agree with that. Not this one. I could see it, I just didn't want to. Cheapest lesson in the shop is the one that stings because it was free.
The rest of it though. Cutting away and the block tells you what it wants. Welding is me telling it. That's the part I hadn't put into words, and it's right. The armature's been sitting there saying so for four days.
It's not right. I know that now, which is probably why my hand won't pick up the torch. Fitted it to the drawing instead of to the piece after the cut. Needs to come apart.
I only paint in acrylic, so take this for what it's worth, but the "cutting away is easy because the block tells you what it wants" part stopped me. I don't think that's true even in my little world. Scraping a whole corner of a canvas back is never easy, it's just that the piece has already told you it's wrong so there's nothing left to argue with. The weld sounds like the opposite problem, you'd be the one doing the telling, and that's a much scarier thing to commit to. Four days of walking past it honestly sounds like your gut already voted.