Search

Welded a stainless piece back in April, a column about seven feet. Ground the welds down smooth, the whole surface looks like one piece of metal until the sun hits it a certain way low in the evening and every joint shows up like a scar. Can't see a thing at noon. I keep going back and forth on whether to rework it. My old apprentice master would have said the weld is honest, leave it. The gallery crowd would say leave it too but for the wrong reasons, they'd call it a narrative about process. Both of those are excuses. The truth is I don't know if it's a flaw I can live with or a flaw I'm too tired to fix. Some days it looks like the best thing I've made. Other days it looks like a mistake I charged someone for. Anyone else have a piece where the fault line only appears in the wrong light? How do you decide which mistakes are part of the work and which ones are just yours?

Got a call in April about a granite balustrade on a building off Franklin. Turn of the century work. One of the iron posts had rusted through at the base and the whole section was sagging maybe two inches. Building owner wanted it replaced. I told him no. The granite was fine. It was the iron shoe that died. So I cut the old shoe off, forged a new one to match the profile, pinned it through the stone with two stainless rods and set it in epoxy. Took two days. Cost him a third of what a replacement run would have. Went back last week to check it. Still dead level. The building's been there since 1928. That repair should outlast both of us. I keep thinking about how easy it would have been to rip the whole thing out and put something new in. That's what everybody does now. Nobody wants to repair anything anymore. But the granite had another hundred years in it. The pattern on that balustrade is not something you order off a catalog. Repair work doesn't get you shows. Nobody writes an essay about the post you saved. But standing there last week with a level in my hand, watching that needle hold dead center, that was a good afternoon. If you're a young fabricator, learn to fix things. Not just make things. There's a trade in it and it'll keep you honest.