Neanderpundit

Steve is spending a great deal of time talking about tools and his acquisition therof; it’s amusing and nice to see him learning what tools to use for what jobs and how to use them.

Growing up around people who used tools for a living, it never occurs to me that people don’t instinctively understand tool use.

It also doesn’t occur to me not to do stuff myself. Sure, there are diminishing returns, but for most jobs, I rent or buy or DIY.

Example: I have a Michigan ledge in my basement. A michigan ledge is what you get when you dig out a crawlspace to form a basement. Usually they stay back from the house foundation about 4′ and pour a new wall and footing. FOr reasons unknown to me, they didn’t do that here, they dug flush to the foundation and poured a wall. I’m concerned about the way they did it, so in order to make sure the walls don’t move around, I bolted them together. I did this by drilling a series of holes along the wall, and anchoring the michigan ledge walls to the original footings. A lot of work. Work I think should have been done by the folks who poured the ledge walls, but wasn’t.

This wasn’t brain surgery. I calculated that I wasn’t going to induce any unwarranted stresses, so I knew the plan was sound. I knew how many bolts per wall I needed so I was secure there. And I just did it. At the sdame time there was a segment of wall that had shifted, and the blocks cracked. I supported the beam over it, removed the blocks, relaid the blocks with sharp sand mortar.

it doesn’t dawn on me that other people are mystified by this stuff. It doesn’t dawn on me that I am doing anything unusual. I just do the stuff, and am done with it.

Are there times when i might be better served to let someone else do the work? Maybe. Maybe I might even be better served to move to an apartment that doesn’t require any maintenance. It’s just not me.

Atheists take note

For all my atheist/agnostic friends: No, this is NOT a prrof of the existence of the creator, just a thought experiment. Participate if you want.

Take the hammer.

The hammer is the basic “complex” tool. Before the hammer, there was the rock. The hammer is basically a rock attached to a stick.

If someone comes to you and places a hammer on the table, and says “this hammer appeared out of the sky, out of thin air” you’d assume that person was from California. Someone found the rock, you’d say. Someone dug around a field full of rocks, and selected one that was better suited to it’s purpose than all the others, someone got that rock. Then, someone took the rock, carefully selected the stick, maybe even used some other tool to properly shape or configure the stick, and somehow attached the stick to the rock. Maybe they used twine made from fibrous plants, maybe plaited hair, maybe a glue made from blood and milk, but there was effort involved in making the hammer.

This is only natural, of course, because that is exactly how hammers are made. From the very first one to every one made today, the process of hammer manufacture has stayed stable for time immemorial. You select a weight/rock/head, you select a handle, you marry the two together.

Simple, straightforward, easy to understand. Everyone knows that hammers do not appear from nowhere, someone makes them. hell, even if the root of a tree grew itself around a rock that was suitable, and in so attached the handle to the rock, someone had to dig it up, separate the “hammer” like parts from the “non hammer” like parts.

So if it is impractical to even suggest that a hammer can come into existence by itself, and must be manufactured- or even mined- by someone, how can it make any sense that the rock that the hammer is made from, the living tree that gave it’s fibrous stem for the handle, in fact all of creation in it’s complexity which is many thousands of more orders of magnitude complex than the simple hammer- how is it possible to think that all of creation with all of it’s complexity simply “occurred”?

I’d be interested in hearing what people have to say about this.

Blindhogg was correct, of course; the little Harbor Freight stove (a two burner version of this one)I have was not qite enough to pump the prerequisite BTU’s into the bluing tank, it took five hours instead of twenty minutes. And the blue is still a little spotty. I’ll hunt with it this winter, and reblue it in the spring, or after season.

I had to surround the tank with blocks and bricks to keep the heat in, and at the end even put a tin sheet over the top to keep the rainwater from cooling it down. THe wind was just taking heat out faster than I could put it in.

I’m gonna buil;d a stand to put it all on, and make some “regular” burners for the tanks, so I can have a boil/degrease tank and a cooldown tank going too. Probably make myself some homemade pipe burners like these as well

Still, the Marlin is not embarrasing, and in fact isn’t horrible at all. Just needs to be pointed at some deer, is all.