June 15, 2004
Still nothing severed yet: nasty incident with a wrench
I was working on our dining room table a few days ago. The table top is made from a glueup, and the whole design is similar to the coffee table and is designed to match it, except in 5/4 stock, 40"x78" big. I was tightening the pipe clamps to draw together the glueup and it was sticking a bit, so I grabbed a big crescent wrench to get some more leverage. As I was tightening it, the wrench slipped off and my fingernail slammed into the neighboring pipe clamp.
As if the hellacious pain wasn't enough, the glue was drying, so I had to finish tightening the other six clamps before I could haul my butt to the doctor's office. To give you some idea how bad this was, when I asked the doctor if I was going to lose the nail, he laughed at me. So I spent the whole weekend taking Vicodin and playing Baldur's Gate (fortunately the ring finger isn't used on the xbox controller). Tomorrow I'm seeing a hand specialist, and the good doctor said something about "drill", so I'm not expecting it to be a pleasant visit.
So the big moral of the story is that you need to be every bit as careful with hand tools as you do with power tools. I can't believe I did all this damage to my hand with a crescent wrench!
(my last entry seems to have conclusively demonstrated that nobody reads the extended entries...)
Posted by danshapiro at June 15, 2004 09:46 AM | TrackBackDang, Dan -- sorry to hear about your injury! I've definitely done serious damage to myself with hand-tools as well. And a pointer to you and all 3 of your other readers :) ...
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you can decide whether to catch a 4' tall concrete pillar as it's toppling over, DON'T! Otherwise you might end up with a wicked gash on the forearm and a crushed index finger.
If for some reason you can't resist this cicrumstance, try to make sure that someone else is home to take you to the ER. ;)
Posted by: Stuart Updegrave at June 15, 2004 04:54 PMWise words! And for the curious, Google registers an average of 56 real pageviews a day (the raw numbers are something like 650 hits per day). Most of those come from people linking directly to the archive, as regular readers tend to view NSY via the RSS feed. Since the RSS feed doesn't show comments or "extended entries", nobody has seen the easter egg in my last post yet. :)
Posted by: Dan at June 15, 2004 10:28 PM