torin3 and I looked at each other and said, "oh, I am so blogging this...We have been wrestling with the damn bender (doing what, Ro? bending, duh) and the fucking thing scoots all over the shop unless both The Chef and I stand on it whilst
torin3 wrangles the lever (let's prove Archimedes was right roughly 238 times over, just for Science, yeah, that's it) and even that was kinda iffy. It had indeed occurred to us at about Iteration 5 of Said Process that this was a Stupid System and that a much heavier stand for the bender was in order (uh Ro? what is a bender? here's a link, ornamental iron scrollwork isn't done with a hammer. Never thought about where it comes from, huh. You sure got some weird pursuits, Ro).So we all trek on over to the Mennonite junkyard (what? yeah, you heard me. It's not like the Amish can run a junkyard can they? Pitchforks don't make good forklifts) where we happily run through enormous piles of indescribable debris: transformers, ship pulleys, old cranes, tractors, silo caps, gas pipe, prehistoric circuit boards, and murder weapons for every whodunit ever written, it's here. A couple hundred pounds later, we return with um, let us generously call them "parts," which when welded together by WelderMan, make a pretty sweet stand.
torin3 is very patient with his Laurel, and indulges her eccentricities when she says things like, "If you cut a piece of pipe like this, and insert this here, and line this thingy up here, and weld this thing here, and do this and this and this and this and this you can make holders for all the attachments and then you can store all these tools and clean up your room when you're done." And patient man that he is, he does it. My Laurel Malcolm? He would have handed me the welder and said, "Show me, darlin'." Which would have actually meant, "Wanna fuck with my project? You do the damn work, then." But Malcolm didn't have Teh Awesomest Apprentice in the world, I do. Hahahahahhahah.So now the bender's got this sweet fancy stand, and the fucker still walks all over the shop. Dammit! Ok, we're not defeated! We'll just drag (and by 'we', I mean
torin3) this convenient heavy piece of H-beam lying around onto the damn stand (doesn't everybody have 200lb chunks of beam handy in their shops?). Dammit, that still doesn't do it. So I stand on it, too. torin3's just sweeping the thing across the floor. This is the point where we looked at each other and laughed. Even we had to realize that it is not a common Sunday pursuit to push 600 or so pounds across the garage for no good reason. And that One Must Blog About That.Maybe a rubber mat, I theorize. Maybe bolting it to the effing floor,
torin3 theorizes. So off to Home Depot & Lowe's for both. At Lowe's, I make my new bestest friend in the world, the Remnants Dude in the flooring department, who for some reason feels a need to mark rubber matting and some oriental carpet down to $2 for me, whereupon I run off with the matting, and torin3 carefully picks out a masonry bit and we return to the scene of the crime.Rubber mat sticks perfectly to the floor. Bender scoots like grease across it. Fuck. Glue the bender to the mat. Bender sticks perfectly to the mat, now slides slicker than snot across the floor. Fuck.
Ok,
torin3, enjoy the benefits of being a homeowner. Drill away. By God, I am an American, I have a Constitutional Right to Drill Holes in My Garage Floor! We tried to avoid it, gave it a real honest effort, but dammit. The best we could come up with is that didn't actually have to drill holes in the bender, just butt it up against bolts in the floor to keep it from scooting. Maintains the illusion of portability. Yeah, that's it.We sure would have felt a lot more like responsible grownups had The Chef not chosen that particular moment to come home. Two exhausted filthy loons hopped up on caffeine drilling random unexplained holes in the concrete floor (uh, you see, the first ones, we hit rocks in the aggregate, that's no good, we had to move over one or two inches, really Chef, it's not as bad as it looks, and all I can think of is the Matt Groening cartoon "Never Drink and Drill") does not convey Trust Us, We're Professionals And We Know What We're Doing. Especially when there is a large pile of junkyard weldings glued to rubber bits in the center of the garage with iron bar sticking out of it at random intervals. "Uh, this is my sculpture entry entitled Rage Against the Cement. It's a postmodern work incorporating cultural values since the industrial revolution and the ambivalence of the modern consumer and the paranoia of the American homeowner...."
She said, "Uh, what are you doing?" and upon receiving the answer, did say "Ok," but not in the tone one would have said, "Oh darling, you bought me roses!" Actually, for someone who just got their garage drilled up, she was pretty cool. I guess she has to be, considering that this is pretty much standard practice in the house. Rats in the fridge, outsider art in the garage, if one of us isn't wiring something to something else, we're hammering it, breeding it, melting it, painting it, welding it, polishing it, cooking it, programming it, garbing it, embroidering it, enameling it, or making it a hat -- brass, felt, or tinfoil.
Just ask the cat.
