Caregiving and Shipbuilding

I had some time this morning to indulge in what I love – making metal art. Today was ‘blacksmithing” a large section of metal cut from a pipe. The piece of pipe was originally intended for the giant fish that went to the desert. The plans changed and the pipe would up sidelined into art supplies. It is 3/8^th’s inch thick mild steel. Radiuses intended to be a pipe rather than a set of horns, I had to both use the direction of the curve and work backwards away from the curve. The primary reason was I already had the material; the second reason was it saved me at least one set of heated curves.

Heating and bending metal of this thickness takes some muscle – and a lot of acetylene. It has to be red hot then carefully coaxed into position. It takes a lot of patience. Some time ago I watched a documentary about Korean shipbuilders. They were bending very thick metal into the bow pieces for a large transport ship. The metal was almost two inches thick and it took two guys to do each piece. They had a huge acetylene torch and a water hose. The torch was to heat the metal and the hose was to cool it. They coaxed the metal very slowly into the large bow shapes of the ship. Obviously they didn’t use this method to build the whole ship - only the bow pieces. Those pieces needed to be very strong. They had to bend the thick sheets into shapes and they had 1/8^th to 1/16^th of tolerance for the finished part. The finished pieces looked a lot like Richard Serra sculpture. They weighed thousands of pounds.

When asked about the range of tolerance they workers wanted, the response was “we want it to be exact”. The lead guy said 1/32^nd off was too much. What does it take to do this – “patience, discipline and a lot of time”. My process today was slow and deliberate. I ran out of 0² before I could finish the part but I had enough time to get it to a point that looked sort of like a finished piece. I was very patient. Coaxing a brain-injured person back requires patience. Sometimes I show it other times not so much. Thinking about those Korean guys gave me pause. They said they loved what they were doing. I feel the same when care giving is going well and we are making progress. Much like getting a piece of art just right, getting my survivor feeling good and good about herself takes discipline and patience. In art there is a lot of allowance for tolerances. Perhaps in care giving that is also the case.

I enjoyed bending the metal today. It was very satisfying.