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Thanks for reading the sixth Crafty Perverts Social Club newsletter. I’m beginning this installment with few guideposts so I’m just gonna wing it and hopefully it won’t matter. The two notes I have on my phone are “That moment when it finally clicks” and “How do I know when my new thing is an obsession?” I’ll leave the latter for another day and share my thoughts here on that moment when it finally clicks. Do you remember the first time you rode a bicycle? Like the first time you were able to pedal and balance without training wheels? I have a vague memory of doing this in front of John Standard’s house when I was about 7 years old. It was that moment when all the theoretical ideas I was taught finally locked in and I not only understood logically what to do, but my body was able to act accordingly. That moment when it finally clicks is that first time you actually do the thing. After so many attempts in which you swore you were doing everything you were told but it still didn’t work, eventually it works. It’s the “ohhh shit, THIS is what people mean when they say THAT” moment. This semester I’ve been taking TIG welding at Laney College. During my early attempts in the in the lab I thought I was doing an OK job of getting bead on plate but the beads would kinda just fall off at the slightest impact and they definitely didn’t look like the welds in the textbook. I asked the instructor for some help, he showed me what to do and it looked to me exactly what I had been doing. I still couldn’t fucking do it after several more attempts. But I kept on going. I just kept trying and kept doing a terrible job and then eventually it worked. I had made a decent weld! I realized that I needed to crank the amperage a bit and wait for a pool of molten steel to develop on my plate before moving the pool forward and adding filler at the correct rate. If those phrases don’t mean much to you, just know that the process finally clicked. It was a moment when I went from feeling completely lost and almost hopeless to a feeling of “ohh fuck yeah, I FINALLY understand kind of.” I paid attention to how far I needed to press my foot down on the pedal and how far I needed to hold my tungsten from the steel and at what angle. I started noticing the differences in arcs when using freshly sharpen tungsten vs crusty ass electrodes that had gotten stuck to the weld pools. It’s all about learning the tools and getting to that point that you can finally intuit what comes next. Once you know how to do it, like truly know, you move beyond simply being able to recite what you’ve been taught and you step into a new realm of developing your craft. You keep practicing and you keep getting better, and perhaps you’ll even have a few more moments where deeper understandings finally click. But there’s a certain magic in that first time when you finally know that you get it. I live for the shit and I hope that you can too.
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