The joy of a good tool is a theme that keeps popping up for me. Along the lines of “when the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail”.
The first time I was struck by this, we were waiting for a plane at SFO. The man next to us was on his phone talking about powder coating. After he got off the phone, I pumped him for information that I thought might be relevant to the painting of bike frames. After a while, he confessed that he actually keeps a powder coating gun in the trunk of his car so that he can powdercoat anything. Anytime. I asked him if he looked at the world in terms of what can/can’t or should/shouldn’t be powdercoated. The answer, of course, was yes. Our conversation had trailed off, but he continued to point out various objects - from rolling suitcase handles, to the legs of the chairs we were sitting on, to small children - see that, you can powdercoat it.
My second experience with this “everything looks like a nail” phenomenon occurred when I had my first go at the sandblaster at Andy Newlands shop. I was cleaning up a fork crown after some overly exuberant torch work, and as I stuck my hands into the thick robotic rubber gloves and picked up the sand hose, I fell under the spell of the sandblaster. Crusty, rusty metal so quickly became shiny and new! I ask Andy if, once he got his sandblaster, everything looked sandblastable. He smiled. Yup…
Just recently I had another one of these tool epiphanies. I was in the kitchen washing a tea straining spoon and felt it break in my soapy hands. Before I could even think “oh, crap!” I found myself thinking “oh, yes!” I have a welding torch. I can fix this!
And sure enough. I took it to the shop, dabbed on a little flux, heated up the tea strainer, and ever so gingerly added the smallest puddle of silver to restore the tea strainer to use once more.
You can see where this leads. Does my whole world look weld-able because I have a welding torch? Perhaps. In which case, maybe the safest thing would be for me get more tools…
