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<\/a>Bobby had recently been assigned the task of cleaning out several junk drawers, finding all the tools and putting them into a donated toolbox, sorting through the rest: toss the detritus and sort the usable “stuff” into big plastic bags by category.\u00a0 So our task now was\u00a0 simpler.<\/p>\nHowever, the toolbox consisted of 3 hammers, a half-dozen badly abused screw drivers, and a pair of pliers.\u00a0 We decided to bring tools from home and do the job the next day.\u00a0 Bobby wasn’t there the next day, so I accomplished the job with the tools I brought.\u00a0 All I was missing was a set of deep sockets (which I didn’t have but Bobby did) and a ratchet.\u00a0 But I did the job with a crescent wrench.\u00a0 The sockets do the job faster and with fewer bloody smears on the fencing, but a crescent wrench will do in a pinch.<\/p>\n
I wanted to double the hinge at the top of the gate (which is at least 8 feet wide, maybe more) to keep it from twisting the hinge again.\u00a0 I lacked one part and a couple of bolts to do that.\u00a0 I picked up the hardware on my day off.\u00a0 I also decided to assemble a usable toolbox.<\/p>\n
My Toolbox History<\/h1>\n
<\/p>\n
At one time, I had a huge roll-around tool chest stocked with many thousands of dollars worth of Snap-on tools — because I worked as an automobile mechanic.\u00a0 Since then my tool collection evolved as I evolved into woodworking, then to furniture building.\u00a0 Economics have changed since those early days too, with tool costs rising and income decreasing.<\/p>\n
I had a nice, basic toolbox in the furnace closet of the house, but what it contained was a rude assemblage of odd tools.\u00a0 About all we ever use of that is the multi-tip screwdriver, the hammer, pliers, and the crescent wrench.<\/p>\n
So I emptied out the toolbox from the house and refilled it with a set of hand tools from the shop suited to most applications: monkey wrench, drain trap wrench, small, medium & large crescent wrenches, channel lock pliers, regular pliers, wire cutters, small tin snips, utility knife, my best multi-tip screwdriver, a few small specialty screw drivers, my short-well 3\/8″ drive sockets, ratchet and extensions, a 1\/4″ socket set — and the new set of 3\/8″ drive-deep well sockets I decided to splurge on while at the hardware store getting fence parts.<\/p>\n All I’m missing are open\/box end wrenches.\u00a0 I’ll get them next.\u00a0 I have a collection of assorted (mostly metric) open\/box ends but they’re just loose — these came with the stationary machine tools I bought for furniture making.\u00a0 I’d prefer a set of metric and a set of SAE that are each in a compact\u00a0 carrier of some sort so I don’t have to empty the bottom of the toolbox each time I’m looking for one specific wrench.<\/p>\n So I took the toolbox and the parts to work, installed the doubler-hinge at the top of the big gate, and felt good about a job done well and done quickly by having a usable toolbox again.<\/p>\n Before I became a furniture maker, I always had a toolbox set up for most normal repairs around the house, in the yard, or on a car — as much as a car cam be fixed with hand tools these days, anyway.\u00a0 I got away from that when I set up the shop.\u00a0 Now I’m back.<\/p>\n Today, Mom went for groceries.<\/p>\n I got a call on my cellphone.\u00a0 It was from Mom.\u00a0 She’s at Wal-Mart and her car won’t start — help?<\/p>\n I did not have to scrabble around in the shop, tossing tools I might need into a cardboard box.\u00a0 Not knowing the problem makes it difficult to know what to take.\u00a0 But having a basic set of hand tools in a toolbox saved time and frustration.\u00a0 So … I set my recently assembled toolbox in the truck, took off, and got her running again in no time.<\/p>\n Funny how things just sort of work themselves out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week there was a fence\/gate repair job that needed doing at work. A co-worker, Bobby, and I were asked to take a look at it and see what we could do. The boss had some parts that might help. They even had a toolbox … of sorts. Bobby had recently been assigned the task … Continue reading “Tale of the Toolbox”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13962,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[19,26],"class_list":["post-13960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-adventures","tag-life-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13960"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20649,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13960\/revisions\/20649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>I had a pretty good, basic set of hand tools (except for a set of 3\/8″ drive deep well sockets) in the workshop, but they are laid out in drawers — as a proper workshop ought to be.\u00a0 This is fine as long as all the work I do is in the workshop.\u00a0 That is no longer the case.<\/p>\nToolbox In Action<\/h1>\n