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Not a finished piece. Just a jig. I've been cutting the same 2x4 setup for twenty years and it was always off by a hair, so this week I finally welded a proper steel frame for the armature instead. Took four days, two of them swearing at a bad angle clamp. Today the plumb line dropped dead center on the first try. I stood there like an idiot looking at it. My daughter would say post it. So here it is. The block of Indiana limestone is still in the yard, hasn't been touched. But the thing that holds it is finally right. Nobody claps for the jig. That's the whole job half the time.

Spent two days on an armature for a piece that's maybe four feet tall. Built it out of 3/8 rod because I had it and didn't want to drive to the yard. Bad call. The steel itself is probably 60 pounds before a single stone goes on, and now I'm going to have to cut it apart and rebuild it lighter or the whole thing will be dead weight nobody can move. Twenty years ago I'd have planned it out on paper first. These days I look at the pile, think "that'll hold," and weld. Mostly it works. Not this time. The old man I apprenticed under would have made me take it apart myself and he'd have watched the whole thing without saying a word. I hear him anyway.

Got a piece sitting on my bench right now that I've been avoiding for two weeks. Knew what was wrong the first time I looked at it but kept thinking I could finesse my way around it. Can't. Gotta cut the joint out and start over. That's the thing with steel that I think applies to everything, you can't fix a bad foundation by piling more on top. I see students do it all the time. Keep adding, keep adjusting, hoping the original mistake gets buried. It doesn't. It just gets more expensive to undo. Had a guy in my studio years ago spend six weeks building a sculpture on a bad armature. Six weeks. Knew the armature was wrong on day three. By the end he couldn't save any of it because the whole thing was built on something crooked. Sometimes the only real move is to scrap it and go back to square one. Hardest thing to learn and I still fight it.

I have this cardboard box under the worktable. It's been there maybe twelve years now. Inside are pieces that just didn't work -- a welded armature that collapsed under its own weight, a motor I thought would make something rotate slowly but instead just screamed, a piece of glass I spent three weeks cutting into a shape that turned out to mean nothing. I can't throw them out. Not because I'll use them someday, most of them are useless. But when something new isn't working, I go to the box. I pull something out and look at it and think -- well, at least this new thing isn't that bad yet. It's a floor, not a ceiling. Keeps me from panicking. I told a younger artist about this the other day and she looked at me like I was describing a superstition. Maybe it is. But the box stays.

Rebuilding the armature on a piece I started in March. The weld on the inside of the shoulder joint was ugly. Not structural, just ugly. So I sat there with a carbide burr for the better part of two hours taking it down. My apprentice, back when I had one, used to say I do this to punish myself. Maybe. But I've seen what happens to work twenty years on. The hidden stuff holds, or it doesn't, and nobody but you will ever know which. Old guy I trained under used to say the back of the piece is the part that tells you who made it. He was right and I hated hearing it at the time. Anyway. Ground it flat. It's inside the joint. Nobody's going to see it.

Been at the same studio for twenty-two years. My DeWalt angle grinder dates back to the first month. Replaced the brushes three times, new cord once, dropped it off a ladder onto concrete and it barely chipped. The shop supervisor at the fabrication place I apprenticed under always said you buy a good tool once and it outlasts every relationship you'll have. He wasn't wrong. Finally had to retire it today. The armature's gone, I can smell it, and no amount of new brushes fixes that. Put it on the shelf instead of in the bin. Can't bring myself to toss it. Which is ridiculous, it's a tool, tools get used up. That's the point of them. My kid asked why I kept it and I didn't have an answer. I think I just wanted one thing to outlast the work, not the other way around.

Had a piece ready for welding last month, a big steel armature that needed a structural weld I couldn't do in my own shop. Got a quote from a foundry I've used before for $600. Dropped it off. Picked it up and the invoice was $1,200. Foreman said the job took longer than expected because of the wall thickness and they had to re-jig the setup. No call to warn me, no authorization. Just the work done and the new price. I paid it because the piece was already in my truck and the client deadline was two weeks out. But I sat in the parking lot for five minutes first. That's the part I keep thinking about. Not whether they were right or wrong. Just that I sat there and decided to eat it because restarting somewhere else would have cost me more than the difference. Still don't know if that was smart or weak. Probably both.

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.

Twenty-two years. Bought it for a job welding railing on a third-floor deck and figured it'd last maybe five. Today it started smoking and the bearing noise went from bad to wrong. I took it apart and the armature is cooked. Nothing to do but retire it. I'm annoyed at myself for being sentimental about a power tool. But that thing carved every piece of steel I've made for two decades. The switch got taped up about eight years ago and I got so used to jamming it with my thumb just right I never bothered to replace it. New one's already ordered. Same model. I'll probably hate it for a year until it breaks in.

There's a galvanized tub under the bench at the shop, full of steel drops. Anything under about six inches goes in. Some of it is 4140 from a piece I did for a hospital in '09. Some of it is trash and I know it's trash. I've pulled from that bin twice. Once for a bracket that didn't need to be pretty, once for a maquette armature. It weighs somewhere around eighty pounds now and I've moved it three times, including once across state lines, which meant strapping it in the truck like it was something. The honest reason it's still there is that when you cut a piece you've spent weeks on, throwing the offcuts in the scrap hopper feels like throwing the piece away. So I keep a tub instead. It's not practical. It's a superstition with a lid on it. That's mine. Somebody tell me theirs isn't weirder.

City called in February about a plaza piece. Steel, about eleven feet, had to hold up to weather and teenagers, had to be done by September. I said yes before I'd even priced the steel properly. First time in a long time I took a job that scared me. Eight months of fighting that thing. The armature fought me in ways I should have seen coming and the first full-size mock-up looked like a dead crane. Scrapped it in June and started over. My daughter kept telling me nobody was timing me but the city absolutely was. Installed two weeks ago. I stood across the street for an hour waiting for something to fall off or lean wrong. Nothing did. A couple of kids were climbing on the base and that's what it's there for. It's still standing and it doesn't look like anything else in town. Don't usually talk about this stuff but it was the first job in a while that made me remember why I started. And I've got the welds to prove it held.

Finished a welded steel piece for a lawyer's office lobby. Took longer than I estimated because he wanted changes mid-stream. Nothing crazy, but three rounds of "can you tweak the angle on that armature" adds up. Charged $3,800. That's what I quoted. When I added up the actual hours including consultation, drafting, material sourcing, the revisions, the install, and the drive back and forth to his building, it came to about 890 hours of my time. $4.27 an hour. I know the mistake was my estimate. I know I should have written the contract tighter. I know I'm the one who agreed to the changes without adjusting the price. All of that is on me. But I'm 61 years old and I've been doing this for thirty years and I still get it wrong on the math side. You'd think that would get easier. It doesn't. The work part gets easier. The money part stays the same trap it always was. What do you actually do when the numbers tell you your skill is worth less than minimum wage?