<deep breath> so i just ruined the blade on my new tool and it immediately brought me back to the thing that's had me frustrated for 6 years
and i'm not saying i'm like, Despondant, just, let me tell you what's frustrating about trying to learn woodworking
I've been at it for years now, and the recurring question that keeps me permanently frustrated is "how *should* this be working?"
how hard should it be to push a hand plane through a piece of 1/2" oak? if it skips and leaves a divot, is that normal? just part of the process? a thing you learn to work around? or does it mean you did something wrong?
how fast should a bandsaw cut? should a table saw cut? should a skilsaw cut? how hard should it be to hammer a chisel through maple?
i've been told i can sharpen my own blades, so maybe I could fix this bandsaw blade. except i don't know what my goal is. how do i know when to stop grinding the blade? how do i know if i did it right?
literally 100% - *literally* - of tutorials on how to sharpen blades are "step 5: sharpen the blade." i'm not joking. and there's no way they could be anything else because you can't describe something like this in text.
the correct way to learn all of this is via apprenticeship, and i don't have access to that resource. It's frustrating because I see all these woodworkers on youtube who just figured it out and I'm *constantly* lost.
I *think* the saw on this blade is ruined? but honestly, like, it's now just cutting like my old shitty 10" was. maybe that's normal, maybe the 10" was fine. i don't THINK it was, i could SWEAR I used to have an easier time. but i don't KNOW.
maybe neurotypical people have what i would think of as eidetic memory, and can just snap their fingers and say "ah yes, before i replaced this blade it took 14 pounds of pressure to push the wood, now it takes 6"
For me it's like... is this right? was it worse before? why is the blade wandering so much? did it always do that? is it because I'm cutting a larger piece of wood? or the tension is different? or the blade guides aren't as close?
it feels impossible to iterate on a hobby when I feel like my memories are constantly gaslighting me, like I swear I remember my old bandsaw working much better before I fucked up the blade on metal (yeah, this is a thing with me) but after I replaced the blade it STILL sucked
So like, what changed? Did I set the new blade up wrong? Is the new blade bad? I mean, this is what sucks - you don't really have the pick of the litter in this market, you're stuck with whatever you can get. It's not like electronics. Store stock sucks.
so if i buy a blade and nothing gets better... was it bad? it might be bad. i hear from people that some brands of blades are just bad, i've heard this about every type of woodworking product i've ever heard of in my life. what is "bad"? i have no idea how to tell.
what do I do if I buy a new blade from Mumble Products Online and things don't get better? or what if I ask myself "is it better now" and i don't *know*? my brain just says "I have no idea, man"
It's really frustrating and it's not anyone's fault. This isn't like, me being angry at an industry. This is just life. It would be like this in the 18th century, or the 12th, or the second. But I would have learned this shit from someone, most likely.
as it is, like... I don't know what I'm doing. I've made a tiny handful of decent bandsaw cuts in my life, I can't really get my pilots wings on this machine yet. like imagine if you learned to drive on a car with two flat tires, would that be worth a shit?
it SEEMS to me like it doesn't work at all. like, at all. I cannot make a straight cut on this bandsaw anymore. my memory says the first three cuts i made were straight as an arrow and very easy, and now they wander and they're really hard to push.
but i don't know. i don't know if that's real or if i made it up. and this is my entire life. i live an epistemological crisis, never knowing if anything i believe to be fact is really fact or just an emotion i manufactured a memory from.
i wish the tools of my hobbies would sit still, instead of jumping from side to side, evading me, mocking me, constantly sending me on wild goose chases to solve problems i don't fully understand, none of which are actually THE TASK AT HAND
i don't want to sharpen blades, or adjust tools, i just want to make cuts! because i'm a billion hours of practice away from knowing how to DO THAT, but every time I try to practice it, my goddamn tools break in a new way!
imagine if you tried to learn to draw, but before you could even make your first attempt at the profile of a face, your pencil lead snapped. so you get a new one, and it snaps. so you get another, and it breaks in half.
so you get another and suddenly it won't stay in your hand, it slides out of your fingers. you try again and again and manage to stop that, but it requires tons of muscle pressure that rapidly starts to hurt. then the graphite stops sticking to the paper.
and nobody knows why this is, or maybe it was always like this. maybe you changed. maybe you weren't paying attention. or maybe you changed paper, or pencil, and forgot it. or
it's so goddamn hard to develop a skill when literally nothing will hold still and let you study it, let you iterate, when it's a constant panting struggle just to stay at square 1.
it is a testament to my dedication (ha) that i haven't given up, except that honestly if i gave up on my desire to have these creative hobbies I think I would literally want to die.
I've never been suicidal in my entire life, but honestly? It's only because I'm too stupid and hardheaded to lose hope. I constantly ignore my uninterrupted string of failures and believe that next time will be better. I have no idea what I'd do if I truly lost that.
oh and final thing before i try to walk this off: it wouldn't hurt nearly as bad if i hadn't just bought myself A WEEK of complete downtime. i can't replace the blade locally. i have to order one or have it custom made, and either one I anticipate will take days.
so i have to wait days and days before I can try again. what then ? will i be able to get myself to use it? or will i be afraid of exactly what just happened happening again? it's a fucking sawblade, i shouldn't have to treat it like a delicate china doll, but I do.
if i could just buy 20 of these and keep them on a hook I could experiment freely, but a mistake of this sort costs $30-50 and multiple days of downtime during which I'll forget all my muscle memory.
all i fucking want is the opportunity to spend a week of evenings UNINTERRUPTED iterating on a craft, not fucking, "you made 14 great, nice, perfectly straight cuts that were right to plan, then broke the fucking tool and will have to relearn everything from scratch next week"
"you made 14 cuts and now the blade is dull. yeah, factories make 4,000 cuts before replacign the blade, but :) you don't :) know anything :) so if you don't replace it :) you'll :) never :) know :) why :) nothings :) working :) :) :)"
hey uh this isn't any kind of social commentary. this is me having an existential crisis in public. it's not anyone's fault or meaningful beyond my private life
