Forged my 500th bottle opener last Tuesday and I just stood there staring at the bucket
Been tracking my output in a notebook since I started smithing about two years back, mostly to see if I was actually getting faster or just telling myself I was. Last Tuesday I finished a batch of 20 openers for a market in Raleigh and did the count, and it came out to 500 exactly. It surprised me because it never felt like that many, and it also made me realize my average time per piece went from about 50 minutes down to 22 since last spring. The whole thing got me thinking about how much of that speed is muscle memory versus me just getting lazy on the finish work. How do you all keep track of whether your quality is holding up as your speed goes up?