Work and Rework

Its funny the things that run through one's mind while grinding for hours in a row. For me I was thinking about how much grinding is the ironworking equivalent to what editing is for the writing process. Grinding cleans up the weld or metal joint or whatever. Editing cleans up the book, short story or poem. Grinding makes the metal beautiful to look at; shiny, polished and smooth. Editing does the same thing for writing. Having said that I never actually edit these blogs. I decided in advance that I wanted them to be a spontaneous example of what they refer to stream-of-consonsciousness writing. A direct link from my brain to yours. And so I will admit in advance that this blog is not a good example of what I am talking about. Grinding is the Ironworker-welder's first real skill. When we start we apprentices often hit the ground in the bolt shack putting nuts and bolts together or they put us on spark-watch (making sure that the welders or grinders who throw a lot of sparks don't burn people or start fires. But those things don't feel like skill jobs. The next thing we do is to fetch and carry whatever our Journeyman (Jman) wants or needs. Again, that doesn't feel like it takes much skill. After that we string and pull a lot of. Able. Not a terribly high skill requirement to do that. Eventually though, you are handed a grinder and pointed to some rough steel and finally you are learning an identifiable skill. Grinding is like the first few moves that you learn in the martial arts. As you will grind more than anything else you do during your career it becomes something that you are very familiar with. I took karate for 10 years with a young Asian guy named Koshin. He was exceptionally talented and beautiful to watch. He had more techniques for use in more situations than anyone else in our club. But when he was attacked on the street one day he simply blocked while side stepping and drove his knee into the guys midsection as the guy was following through wih the initial punch. Simple. Effective. And we learned all 3 of those things in the first few classes leading up to our yellow belt grading. How similar grinding is for the welder Ironworker. Every skilled ironworker not only started their careers with significant grinding work but are also still very capable of it and probably still grind regularly. I was chatting with our General Foreman Brad the other day and he was telling me how back when he started in the late 70s or early 80s he spent 3 months grinding out the inside of a tank working 10 hours a day! I watch big Wayne most days working on handrails up at the top of the surge bin. He is a fabulous welder and has been given the task of getting these handrails up and operational. He starts with the welding part but finishes always with some significant welding to clean up and pretty up the joints where he has welded the pieces together. When he is finished the joint is so perfect and smooth that it isn't distinguishable from the straight piece any more except because of the lack of paint. All good welders are good grinders first. So I focus on learning the tricks about grinding from the various Jmen. Things like which disk to use in different situations, what angle to hold the grinder at for various tasks and just as importantly how to use the grinder safely. I can see that grinding is the important finishing step to making our work beautiful. It is how we edit our work. It is our caulking and paint; our inside out block followed by a knee to the guts. It is our finisher. And because of those reasons I genuinely like grinding and work hard at doing whatever it takes to become better at it. I suspect the real key to grinding though is to do it over and over again. And so I happily grind away the metal while I grind away the hours. ((To Spuds McIron...get well. We all miss you!!))