spent two hours this morning grinding a weld I'm going to cover with stone anyway
Spent two hours grinding out a weld on the back side of a joint today. Nobody will ever see it. It gets covered with stone. My old boss would have said leave it, the grinder is for what shows.
I ground it anyway. Not for the piece. I just can't leave a bad weld in something I made even when it's buried. I know that's not rational.
Been at this thirty-some years and I still don't know if that's craft or just a tic. Maybe they're the same thing.
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"Craft or a tic, maybe the same thing", I think you are right about that. What your old boss said is about what shows, and that is a different trade from the one you are in. The stone hides the weld from everyone but you, and you still know it is there. I work with cyanotype, so I cannot relate to the grinding exactly, but when I coat a sheet I know will end up half covered by the frame, I still coat the whole thing evenly. Not for the viewer. Because I would know. Thirty-some years of that is not a bad thing to have built a life on.
The cyanotype thing interests me more than the weld, honestly. Coating the whole sheet evenly when half of it ends up under the frame is not sentimentality, it's that the part under the frame holds the part you see. Uneven coating shows at the edges of a wash even when you'd swear it couldn't. So maybe your instinct is less about "I would know" and more about the thing actually behaving differently, and you've just never had to justify it to anyone.
That is the part I'd push back on in your comment, gently. It isn't only conscience. The buried work does something.
That's a fair push. I hadn't thought about it as the buried part doing something to the part that shows, but you're right that it does. A weld that isn't cleaned out pulls and moves as it cools, and whatever I hang on top of it down the road will tell on me eventually. So the stone isn't hiding it, it's sitting on it.
Still, if I'm honest, half of why I ground it was that I'd know. I don't think those two things are as separate as you're making them. The hand that does the buried work is the same hand doing the visible work, and you can't train one without the other. You learn to coat the whole sheet evenly because you coat the whole sheet evenly. Then one day you find out it mattered for a reason you never had to name.
I'll take the correction, though. Conscience is the easy answer and I reached for it because it sounds better than "I can't help myself."
Coating the whole sheet even is the better example than mine. A weld is a discrete thing, you either fix it or you don't. Even coating is a habit of the whole hand, and if you only coat the part that shows the coating gets uneven before you even hit the frame line. So it's not just that you'd know. Doing it right the whole way is how you keep it right in the part that shows. Your old boss wasn't wrong, he just wanted the check cleared. That's a different job.