DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly
snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it
smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the
room, splattering it against that freshly painted airplane
part you were drying.

WIRE WHEEL: Cleans paint off bolts and then throws
them somewhere under the workbench with the speed of
light. Also removes fingerprint whorls and hard-earned
guitar calluses in about the time it takes you to say,
"Ouch...."

ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for spinning
pop rivets in their holes until you die of old age.

PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads.

HACKSAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the
Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into
a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you
attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your
future becomes.

VISE-GRIPS: Used to round off bolt heads. If nothing
else is available, they can also be used to transfer
intense welding heat to the palm of your hand.

OXYACETYLENE TORCH: Used almost entirely for
lighting various flammable objects in your shop on fire.
Also handy for igniting the grease inside the wheel hub
you want the bearing race out of.

On Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:17:39 -0500, Brian
wrote:

[derogated erzatz internet version snipped]

Compare to the original:


The Right Tool For The Job
by Peter Egan
Road & Track
April, 1996

Had a strange dream the other night: I was out in my workshop, making
sandwiches, for some reason, and I had about a dozen slices of bread
laid out on the workbench. (Sanitation is meaningless in dreams,
unless the dream lasts long enough for you to become seriously ill.)
Oddly, I was spreading mayonnaise on the bread with a tiny Craftsman
screwdriver of the size normally used to fix alarm clocks or busted
Smiths tachometers. Naturally, it was taking forever, and I was quite
frustrated with the whole process.

Before we put too heavy a Freudian spin on this dream (inadequate
tools, etc.), I should mention that I had some Wild Turkey on the
rocks after a dinner of chorizo enchiladas with Negra Modelo, which is
asking for trouble if you include the espresso we had while watching
Bullitt again. When I went to bed, my neurons were firing like a
string of cheap Chinese firecrackers.

Anyway, dedicated mechanics will recognize immediately the source of
frustration in this dream: I was using the wrong tool for the job.

Anyone with an ounce of mechanical experience will tell you that a
better tool for spreading mayonnaise on bread would have been, say, a
broad-tipped Snap- on gasket scraper or an old hacksaw blade with some
spring to it. The only legitimate use of a small, thin-tipped
Craftsman screwdriver, of course, is to mix epoxy resin and hardener
to a consistent dark gray color on the torn-off lid of a Fram oil
filter box.

There's a lot of this kind of tool-use confusion in garages today, so
I thought it might be helpful (leaning on my years of experience, as
usual) to reveal to the novice mechanic the rightful roles of the
tools found in that 2000-piece tool set your family got you for
Christmas ($4000 cheaper than if they'd bought each tool separately!).
Let's start with the main stuff.

Hammers: Probably the Original Tool, if you exempt (as I always do) a
straw stuck down a termite nest in search of food, as used by lower
primates and some of the guys who were in my high school shop class.
Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer is nowadays used as
a kind of divining rod to locate expensive car parts not far from the
object we are trying to hit. For those with a more accurate sense of
aim, the hammer is useful for tapping on oilpans, water pumps and
other brittle pot-metal castings to see if we've forgotten to remove
one of the bolts, which we have.

Electric hand drill: Normally used for spinning steel Pop rivets in
their holes until you die of old age, but it also works great for
drilling rollbar mounting holes in the floor of a sports car just
above the brake line that goes to the rear axle.

Pliers: Used to round off bolt heads.

Hacksaw: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board
principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable
motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more
dismal your future becomes.

Vise-Grips: Used to round off bolt heads. If nothing else is
available, they can also be used to transfer intense welding heat to
the palm of your hand.

Oxyacetylene torch: Used almost entirely for lighting those stale
garage cigarettes you keep hidden in the back of the Whitworth socket
drawer (what wife would think to look in there?) because you can never
remember to buy lighter fluid for the Zippo lighter you got from the
PX at Fort Campbell.

Zippo lighter: See Oxyacetylene torch.

Whitworth sockets: Once used for working on older British cars and
motorcycles, they are now used mainly for hiding 6-month-old Salems
from the sort of person who would throw them away for no good reason.

Drill press: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat
metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest
and flings your beer across the room, splattering against the Rolling
Stones poster over the bench- grinder.

Wire wheel: Cleans rust off old bolts and then throws them somewhere
under the workbench with the speed of light. Also removes finger-print
whorls and hard-earned guitar callouses in about the time it takes you
to say, "Django Reinhardt."

Hydraulic floor jack: Used for lowering a Mustang to the ground after
you have installed a set of Ford Motorsports lowered road springs,
trapping the jack handle firmly under the front air dam.

Eight-foot-long Douglas fir 2x4: Used for levering the car upward off
the hydraulic floor jack, perhaps.

Tweezers: A tool for removing wood slivers.

Phone: Tool for calling your neighbor Chris to see if he has another
hydraulic floor jack.

Snap-on gasket scraper: Theoretically useful as a sandwich tool for
spreading mayonnaise; used mainly for getting dog-doo off your boot.

E-Z Out bolt and stud extractor: A tool that snaps off in bolt holes
and is ten times harder than any known drill bit.

Timing light: A stroboscopic instrument for illuminating grease
buildup on crankshaft pulleys.

Sanyo boombox: An electomechanical device that miraculously allows the
lovely Cecilia Bartoli to sing Rossini arias in a garage full of
choking paint fumes, which is something she would not normally be
inclined to do.

Two-ton hydraulic engine hoist: A handy tool for testing the tensile
strength of ground straps and hydraulic clutch lines you may have
forgotten to disconnect.

Shop manual: A kind of mirror whose smudges and grease stains reflect
the true soul of the clean and apparently innocent car standing
nearby; the automotive equivalent of a police blotter.

Shop rags: Composed almost entirely of pink lint, shop rags are
essentially a washable version of the shop manual; when laundered at
home they add a nice fresh scent to the washer and dryer.

Craftsman ½ x 16-in. screwdriver: A large motor mount prying tool that
inexplicably has an accurately machined screwdriver tip on the end
without the handle.

Compression gauge: Used during buyer's inspections by overly cautious
consumers who do not own a 2-ton hydraulic engine hoist or a Craftsman
½ x 16-in. screwdriver.

Outside micrometer: A device for periodically reviewing the meaning of
all those little incremental marks on the barrel and trying to
remember whether they translate into thousandths or hundred
thousandths of an inch and exactly how many decimal places to the
right of the period that is, anyway.

Battery electrolyte tester: A handy tool for transferring sulfuric
acid from a car battery to the inside of your toolbox after
determining that your battery is dead as a doornail, just as you
thought.

Metric wrenches: Used on cars from countries whose citizens believe
that an acute misunderstanding of the earth's circumference (updated
to a unit equal to 1,650,763.3 wavelengths of the orange-red radiation
of an isotope of krypton) is a more legitimate and easier–to–visualize
form of measurement than the instep of a dead king (as in, "Ludwig,
let us pace off those wavelengths again!" Or, "Zut alors! I need to
measure the curtains and I have forgotten my isotope of krypton!"). On
American and British cars, metric tools are used primarily to round
off bolt heads.

Aviation metal snips: See hacksaw.

Trouble light: The mechanic's own tanning booth. Sometimes called a
drop light, it is a good source of vitamin D, "the sunshine vitamin,"
which is not otherwise found under cars at night. Health benefits
aside, its main purpose is to consume 40-watt light bulbs at about the
same rate 105-mm howitzer shells might be used during, say, the first
few hours of the Battle of the Bulge. More often dark than light, its
name is somewhat misleading.

Phillips screwdriver: Normally used to stab the lids of old-style
paper-and-tin oil cans and splash oil on your shirt; can also be used,
as the name implies, to round off Phillips screw heads.

Air compressor: A machine that takes energy produced in a coal-burning
powerplant 200 miles away and transforms it into compressed air that
travels by hose to a Chicago Pneumatic impact wrench that grips rusty
suspension bolts last tightened 40 years ago by someone in Abingdon,
Oxfordshire, and rounds them off.

Grease gun: A messy tool for checking to see of your zirk fittings are
still plugged with rust.

Deep-well sockets: Normally used as piston-pin and wheel-bearing
drifts, deep- well sockets are also good for drawing circles when a
coffee-can lid would be way too big.

Toshiba miniature refrigerator: A trouble-free appliance, manufactured
to metric standards; used primarily to chill Lotus piston pins down to
an easy press-fit while storing up to 12 bottles of Guinness stout,
proving once again that Science is really at its best in the service
of Art.

Well, that's enough for now. I've got lots of unmentioned tools left
in the old box, but I should probably save them for another day when I
run out of column ideas, much as I did earlier this morning.


--
LRod

Master Woodbutcher and seasoned termite

Shamelessly whoring my website since 1999

http://www.woodbutcher.net

Proud participant of rec.woodworking since February, 1997

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