| October 18, '02: Here's a juicy one for ya. This is what happens when a 20ft by 2ft truss, which is sitting on the ground the way it should, decides to topple over. I was standing just a wee bit too close and got clipped by the corner of a 2x4 support bracket. What I was doing was wobbling the truss by hand just a tiny bit so that it would line up better when I went to snag it with my forklift. I was doubly lucky: I had just turned away so it only grazed me and SWMBO was home to drive me to the emergency room. Then I had to wait 3-1/2 hours to get treatment; busy day in the emergency room... |
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| Once upon a time I decided it would be simpler if I had a log splitter for my steamboat's wood appetite. The cheapest one I could find in a catalog was over $1,000 so I decided to design my own. This was before I learned how to weld and a friend connected the dots for me. Don't blame him for the failure though; he's a far better welder than I'll ever be! It was bad design, plain and simple. |
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Here's a close-up of what went wrong: despite our best efforts to make a strong weld, the third piece of Eucalyptus proved too much for the back-stop. It is "ripped" in both directions because I thought it would be possible to reverse the damage by turning the part around on the unit and ramming it back into shape. Result: it ripped again, on the opposite set of welds!
Naturally, after this debacle was a fait accompli, Harbor Freight offered one in their catalog for around $100.-, about the cost of parts and labor for my contraption... |
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