[TheForge] [YAK] Re: CRS attack

[Mike]

> No matter how many pliers and hammers I plant in the ground, they
> never seem to sprout into a tool tree.

Me neither.  Must be an old notion.

My son, when he was a teen ager, turned up a couple of lumps of rust
from the back yard that were barely recognizable as axe heads.  They
lay on a big rock for a decade or two as kinda lawn ornaments until
last year when I wanted to try that electro-chemical cleaning y'all
were talking about.  So I cleaned them.  Both are wrought with
welded-in steel bits.  One is mid-19th c. style with a poll deformed
from use as a hammer.  The other is late 1700s style and has a piece
of iron welded onto the poll with the grain running parallel to the
helve.  Neither had ever put up a little screw-driver bush, let alone
an axe tree.

But always remember to bury those pliers, axes and hammers.  If you
do, the gods smile occasionally:

I once had a roll bar -- the kind of mechanic's pry bar with a point at
one end and a short curved hook at the other, about 18" long.  It was
so good it *never* broke.  I once drove it into the hard-frozen surface
of my dirt road its full length and hooked a come-along to it to winch
my Land Rover out of the ditch.  Bent it about 70 deg. doing that.
Straightened it and it was as good as new.

Now the Yarn:  I had a neighbor whose nephew was a young scapegrace in
New York City.  Once the nephew was visiting here in NS and, knowing I
had been a "foreign car" mechanic in a previous life, they asked me to
drop in with some tools and fix up something or other on the nephew's
old, beat-up Porsche.  Did that.  A month later, I realized I had left
that roll bar in the engine compartment of the Porsche.  Called the
neighbor, only to learn that the Porsche had been stolen in NCY.  So
much for the bar.

A couple of years later, believe it or not, the NY cops recovered
the Porsche, IDed it and returned it to the nephew.  On his next
visit, I had a not too hopeful look under the engine cover and there
was my pry bar.

And no, I don't still have it.  What the gods give they also take.  I
should have buried a nice pair of ViseGrips(tm) as soon as I had the
bar back.


- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer@tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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