Tuesday Tool High Impact Edition

I have to admit, I laughed the first time I saw a cordless screwdriver advertised.  For a long time, I held the belief that using a drill as a screwdriver was for sissies.  I also thought that battery-powered hand tools were a needless luxury, and kind of weak to boot.  I now file those beliefs with the follies of youth, like my juvenile dislike of strawberries and Brahms.  A perfect wild strawberry and the violin sonata No. 1 in G, Op. 78 changed my mind about berries and Brahms; here is what changed my mind about cordless screwdrivers:


The Makita LXT 18V cordless impact driver. 

Screws are, for many (but not all) applications, better than nails.  They hold tight, they don't make the two pieces you're joining dance a waltz, they make pieces of wood suck up against each other, and they are reversible.  If you have this tool, you can bury a 3" screw in about a second, and you don't need the room or strength to swing a hammer.  You can also undo the work of your predecessors, if (as in our kitchen floor) they anchored Hardy-backer to plywood with  glue and zillion kajillion screws.  You can injure yourself, but I've only Phillipsed my thumb once, and I've hammered the same appendage a lot of times. 

Oh, and things that I thought were silly?  The belt hook?  I use it constantly.  The little LED light above the trigger?  Phenomenally useful in the poorly lit nooks one finds oneself in all the time, and I've used it as a flashlight at night.  

I went out and bought this tool because I was starting to feel guilty about constantly stealing it from our general contractor.  The Real Doctor's brother may be getting one, for much the same reason.  It just rocks. 

Friday Flora--Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?

A five-leaf clover, courtesy of L, photo courtesy of the Real Doctor.  Extra lucky.

(Apparently, Occidentals are not the only ones to think that developmental anomalies in plants somehow portend good fortune.  Rare double heads of rice were treasured as harbingers of good fortune by the imperial Chinese (e.g., with an interesting back-story).  This makes a little more sense than the clover--with the rice, at least your bowl will be twice as full, but a superfoliar clover gets you nothing more than an incrementally more contented goat.)

For crossword puzzle and scrabble fans

Q:  what do the following have in common?
El'gygytgyn
Aoueloul
Tookoonooka
Yarrabubba

A:  they are all astroblemes.

Tuesday Tool: Screwy

The last Tuesday Tool was kind of old-fashioned; today's is ancient and at the same time totally high-tech.  It's the TEKS Wood-to-Metal self-drilling, self-tapping screw.

So here's the problem: I wanted to attach a piece of wood to quarter-inch thick metal.  Until a week ago, I would have thought it necessary to drill a hole in the wood and drill a hole in the metal and then tap some threads in the hole in the metal.  If I did that, I'd need to make sure that the holes lined up exactly, and that the hole in the wood was a size larger than the hole in the metal so the threads didn't engage the wood, and I'd have to exercise some care in tapping threads.  A week ago, I was introduced to this screw. 

The tip of the screw is hard metal shaped into a bit.  It's the first thing the wood feels, as it rapidly gets holed.  The next thing the wood feels is a pair of "ears" behind the bit; these widen the hole in the wood so that the wood never feels the threads on the screw.  When the tip of the screw has traveled through the wood and hits the metal, it keeps on drilling.  When the ears hit the metal, they snap off and become lodged in the wood.  The first bit of threading is grooved to act as a tap, and it cuts threads into the metal.  Then, the threads bite into the metal, and pull the head--and ultimately the wood--snug against the metal.

It's brilliant: you clamp your wooden post into place on the metal, put one of these screws on your drill, and away you go--and in a few seconds, your post is firmly in place.  It's ancient technology--the screw is simply an inclined plane, one of the classical "simple machines."  It's high tech--I assume some metallurgical expertise had to go into making the bit and tap parts hard enough, and the screw precise, and it would be useless without power tools to drive it.  Brilliant--to whoever designed this, Bravo/Brava!

UPdate

MY BLog

We Found six kittens
and I found way more
Four Leaf clovers and
The kittens names are:
Flufy, PuffBall, Mopet, Mittens,
Midnight, April.

Introducing a guest blogger

Good golly things have been busy around here--so busy I haven't been able to do much here.  In an effort to get more consistent reporting, I've decided to bring in guest bloggers.  My hope is that I'll be able to preserve the unique character and voice of this blog while maintaining the frequent posting which I know so many readers value in a blog.  The identities of the guest bloggers must, unfortunately, remain secret, and I won't be flagging the guest posts--I make this note only in the interest of full disclosure.

OK, back to work.  I've got some laundry to do.