In my experience, the thing that hurts new smiths is a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Too many think they know it all, and "SFL" (screwdriver, file, license) is enough to begin work. Most have read just enough to be dangerous. They try to tackle jobs they can't do and have no idea how to approach, ruin guns, and even in some cases make guns dangerous. A case of the latter was the "gunsmith" who worked on 1911's. He got so unhappy about his knife edge sears being damaged by dropping into the half cock notch that he ground off that notch. When his guns went full auto, he was "persuaded" to find another business.
Others have chambered rifles with twist drills because reamers were too expensive, adjusted headspace by grinding the back of the locking lugs, heated bolts white hot while turning down bolt handles, welded on handles that came off the first time the customer opened the bolt, polished sears and created a failure to reset and highly dangerous rifles, cracked receivers removing/replacing barrels, "re-blued" handguns with a torch, installed a military takeoff barrel upside down and cut the stock out for the rear sight, annealed a receiver for drilling holes by heating the whole receiver red hot, drilled a dozen holes in a Winchester Model 71 receiver trying to install a scope, etc., etc.
IMHO, you can learn right or forget it. If you needed heart surgery, would you want a doctor who had only read about the procedure?
Jim
