Screwdrivers ain’t what they used to be

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I spent most of the day yesterday trying to fix the rear door on this cargo trailer I swapped from Gale.  When he was backing it up an innocuous righteously small cedar tree got in the way and it poked a less-than-righteous hole in the door.  Easy enough to fix, thinks I.

But fixing it involved removing a lot of screws holding the door together, which revealed an engineering problem with the way the stop to hold the door open was installed when the trailer was built.  Some genius put it at the bottom of the door so’s everytime the door swung open and hit it, gradually it destroyed the structural member at the bottom of the door.

The long lever arm at the top of the door kept pushing when the bottom of the door stopped, and all that energy was transmitted to the bottom of the hinge every time the door experienced an uncontrolled swing to the stop.

Heluva deal.  The internal structure of the door at the bottom of the hinge is requiring some innovative changes, along with adding a new stop at the top to keep it from happening in the future. 

But naturally, that ain’t all.  The screws holding the entire skin together, the hinge attachment to the door and trailer, everywhere a screw is, involves screws with little star-shaped holes in them instead of hex-head, phillips, or flathead.

Ended up putting vice-grips on the heads to loosen them enough to twist them out.  Those I could get vice grips on.  But hell, me being the useless eater I am, it ain’t a big deal for a job to take two, three, four days that ought to take a couple of hours.

The cats don’t mind and the government’s shut down anyway.  Not much point doing anything exciting when the government’s shut down.

At least not until they shut it down long enough to force me to stick up banks to buy cat food and Smack Raman.   Seems the useless eaters in the White House and US Congress have decided useless eaters on Social Security pensions are up for grabs to be held hostage on whatever-the-hell it is they’re up to.

Never stuck up a bank, though I have done a good many other things in my life.  The cats and I are looking forward to expanding our horizons.

Old Jules