[TheForge] [Around_the_Anvil] RE: Peter Ross

[Bob Ehrenberger]

I struggle between doing repetitive work to pay the bills and individual
work which is more creative but almost always takes longer than expected and
thus doesn't make the return I would like.

I remember watching a Doug Hendrickson demonstration where he explained that
the element he was making had started out as a mistake when he was making
something else.  The important thing was that instead of just discarding it
when it didn't come out the way he wanted, he looked at it and said, "that's
and interesting shape, I bet I can use that for something"

Repetitive work has it's place and making 50 of something helps to develope
my skills.  I know that I can draw a dozen tapers and have them all look
nice and come out within 1/8" of each other in length.  There was a time
when I would have to rework the shorter ones to get them that close. Doing
production work has also helped me decide when to stop, and say close
enough. My sometimes apprentice tends to try to get everything perfect, and
goes into planishing mode when he should still be in roughing it in mode.

I'm starting to ramble so I'll give one non-blacksmith example, and stop.
Before I became a blacksmith I used to be a software engineer, when I
started in the early 70's we would write our design documents out by hand
and a secretary would type them up. We would review them and the secertary
would make the corrections, white out for minor changes retyping the whole
thing for major changes.  By the time I quit in 2000 the engineers typed
their own documents on a PC. We spent a lot of time making them pretty, but
the content wasn't any better and sometimes not as good. A lot of time was
spent making them dumb enough for management to understand. The point being
because the tools had improved (type-writers vs word processors) we had
changed our focus from content to appearance.

Robert Ehrenberger
Shelbyville, Mo.
eforge at centurytel.net