Power Tool Mayhem

Taking on a project with a buddy is one of the special joys in life. There are times when you can’t get it done without an extra set of hands. Such are the times when something fairly simple can spin out of control, sometimes happily so.

Over the years I’ve been asked to help on a coupla different tasks by friends. They rarely ask for help a second time. It’s not so much my incompetence as the bad luck I seem to bring.

F’rinstance: soon after the wife and I moved into our house, my friend Louie cheerfully offered to help run a rototiller up our hillside to till for some wildflower seed sowing. You can imagine what could have happened and almost did. Gravity and equilibrium eventually triumphed and the running rototiller tumbled down the hillside with both of us attempting to hold it back. Those gas powered tines almost took a chunk outta our legs. I flashed back to the time a chainsaw kicked back and stalled when the fabric of my sweatshirt choked-off the now dying motor and prevented a swift, nasty laceration to my arm.

Last year Louie asked me to help tarp-over a mutual friend’s porch roof. At one point a swinging claw hammer almost contacted my cabeza. During a lunch break the wind dragged the tarp half-off, which then tipped over the ladder so it could slash my truck’s hood and quarter panel. To my knowledge the handsome brown tarp is still doing its job.


When Louie and his patient wife moved into their house years ago, they didn’t care for the deer antlers left on the wall. Our place was way more country and befitting of those horns, so up on our wall they went, above the fireplace, upside-down to make drying hats and mittens handy. My country friends got a real kick out of pointing out that the points were “bassackwards,” and weren’t convinced of the utilitarian set-up. They don’t grace any surface at the moment.

I believe those antlers belonged to a buck that once hung from a cedar-poled clothesline crosspiece at Louie’s. Over the ‘bout twenty years that we’ve been to their place, I’ve seen that ganged, true-dimension, 2 by 4 crosspiece, which once held a mighty eight-pointer’s weight, go to pieces. Rot had sentenced it to a ”fix-by-baling-twine,” literally. But it held fast, mostly because heavy, well-screwed straps held its horizontal altitude.

At this point I should confess to my sometime obsessive-compulsive tendency about this or that. Watching that clothesline, deer-hanging crosspiece surrender itself over time, I started to say to my friend Louie: “We could fix that, you know -- make it able to bear true weight again!” The campaign took several years. It wasn’t mentioned at every visit, but often enough to be just this side of a harangue. Or maybe it crossed over.

Finally, the opportunity presented itself. Two stout cedar poles and all necessary tools were bungeed and stowed in the truck and we went to Louie and Di’s quickly-called barbecue. Our friends moaned when they saw the tool box. This couldn’t end well.

Those stoutly set screws weren’t all coming out easily. Even an 18-volt Dewalt and a less than perfect bit couldn’t prevent leverage by Louie being the main removal method.

Which led to injury, of course.

When a screw finally gave it up, something smacked hard onto my lower thumb. Icing it helped a lot, but I thought it might be cracked for awhile there.

What really cracked were the old cedar posts. One of the final heaves that we gave the old crosspiece broke a post below ground. You could really hear it go. Putting a new crosspiece on would be like putting lipstick on this old clothesline hanger. The honest assessment of the situation emerged from the crowd: “It’s toast!” Now Diane could speak her mind: “I’ve always hated that thing;” leaving Louie with one choice.

He broke the back of the other post and the whole mess went into my truck.

The posts will live on as landscape edges after I cut the bad ends off with a chainsaw.

It’d be great if Louie could give me a hand with that -- as long as neither of us loses one trying to do it.