Mark Hooper wrote:
>
> I think you mean light-fingered... :^P
I've nearly done that, and more.
In my younger years, I had to work in some rather brutal independent repair
shops, very little in the way of safety
equipment, and for owners who expected a lot of hustle. I put a rusty splinter
in the pupil of my eye from a grinder with a
bad safety shield (wanna tell you--hurts like a bastard...); in another shop,
slipped on oil on a painted shop floor (it was
a Friday, and I was doing late shift, everybody had left without cleaning up)
and landed on an elbow. That smarted.
Worked for a low-rent Jeep dealership in the late `70s, and because Jeep had
gone cheap on exhaust hangers on the pickups,
the combined weight of and heat from the catalytic converter would cause the
pipes to sag. The answer was to put the truck on
the lift, get a transmission jack under the converter and then rapidly heat the
pipes on either end so that they were both
red-hot, then raise the trans jack, repeating this until it was back in the
proper position, let it cool, then add a couple
of exhaust hangers. Because of my size and the location of the converter, the
only way for me to do this procedure was to
drape my arms over the driveshaft. One day, I got the acetylene torch too close
to the pipe and it popped. This startled me,
naturally, and I moved backwards, which caused my arms to roll over and off the
driveshaft, and the torch passed over my free
hand (the one without the glove, because the left-hand one in the shop had been
long since lost), so I learned about
third-degree burns.
The stupidest one, though, was working on my VW bus. I'd been diddling around
with the belt tension, and it still looked a
little loose while running, and was sort of applying a bit more tension to the
outside of the belt with a small screwdriver,
just to see how the belt behaved. Then, went momentarily brain-dead and put the
screwdriver on the inside of the belt. Yes,
the belt sucked in the screwdriver, and before I could let go of it, my finger,
too. It went around the pulley and I yanked
it out. Most amazing thing... it was like I watching a horror movie of some
physical transmogrification. My finger swelled up
to the size of a bratwurst sausage in about thirty seconds. Didn't do that one
again....
Hmm, the Bronze Age was what, 4000 years ago?, and we still haven't figured out
how not to do ourselves in with tools?
<smile>
Cheers.
--
Michael D. Porter
Roswell, NM (yes, _that_ Roswell)
[mailto:mporter@zianet.com]
Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's within walking distance.
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