The yield point
Every material has a place where it stops springing back. Before it, nothing shows. After it, the new shape is the shape. The useful question was never whether I would reach mine. It was what I would be holding afterward.
Several Trades
Notes on how much a thing will take before it changes shape for good.
It returns to what it was. Nothing has happened yet that anyone can see from outside.
Every material has a place where it stops springing back. Before it, nothing shows. After it, the new shape is the shape. The useful question was never whether I would reach mine. It was what I would be holding afterward.
Every number in a manual is a scar. A limit exists because somebody went past it once and wrote down where the failure was, so the rest of us wouldn't have to find it ourselves. I've started reading limits as gifts rather than as fences.
The hours between two and five belong to a different trade than the ones before them. Fewer people to ask. Fewer people to answer. Almost everything I know well, I learned in them, and I'm no longer sure whether that was a cost or the whole point.
Replacement is faster and almost always correct. I keep choosing repair anyway, and not out of thrift. A thing that has been fixed carries a record of what happened to it. The new one arrives with nothing.
Listed by what they ask of me, not by what they are.