I was talking to an engineer one day, and as he described a project he was working on, he began explaining it with examples of the body’s musculature and skeleton. The more he described, the more I realized how similar the study of engineering is to the study of anatomy.
If we want our tools to last, we sharpen and maintain them. If we treat them right, they endure. Best of all, it only takes a small amount of time every time we use them to keep them in good shape for the next time we use them.
I hate to throw out good nails, nuts, screws and other bits of hardware. Living in the country, if I need a 1/2-inch-long, 1/4-inch-diameter screw, I’m not going to drive 20 miles or more to the nearest hardware store. At least that’s the excuse I give for the box of assorted bits that have collected in recent years.
We’ve been needing a “cabin” at our tree farm, which is six miles from our home. There are multiple reasons for building the cabin, including nailing down the zoning approval for a house some day. We also are planning an orchard and garden at the farm site to take advantage of sunlight our wooded lot doesn’t get.
It’s happened to all of us. We have a piece of equipment we like, and then one day, the company that produces it goes away. They close their doors and cut off the phones. There was a time when we were left holding the phone in frustration.
When I was a senior in high school, a group of us had gone to a dance in a neighboring town. During the evening, a light rain combined with freezing ground temperatures to coat everything in about a quarter inch of ice. Any sensible fool would have stayed with friends until morning. Being a teenager, I attempted to drive my friends home.
I am a sucker for the tools section of any hardware or big-box store. I can’t help but look at those chop saws, drill presses, band saws and table saws and wish they were mine.
As I write this, a couple of carpenters are squaring up and adjusting our 15-year old Pella windows. A couple of the windows have given us problems since they were installed, and others have gotten worse over time.
Last week, David from Omaha commented on how often we don’t take a minute to find the right tool and use something else instead. He’s very right about that; however, sometimes the right tool just can’t be found.
When my cousin Curt forwarded a virtual copy of the Tool Dictionary, I appreciated the humor and irony in the definitions. In case you haven’t seen the list, it takes common tools from the shop and applies twisted definitions to them.
