Post 2 December,2019
Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. We certainly did with lots of family around, and a full refrigerator with various containers of excellent food left over to keep us in holiday mode until Christmas. It was so nice I became delinquent on writing posts.
But I continued to work on my antique Peterbilt truck with my friend Loren Bryson, and once again became aware of the amount of time I spend looking for tools and parts, in particular fasteners —screws, nuts, bolts, rivets, etc. and associated tools such as screw drivers, wrenches, and rivet guns. Loren demands historical accuracy, and is somewhat of an expert in fasteners, since he works three days a week in a large hardware store, so the proper fasteners, and the necessary tools to install them must be found – as is the case of all of my restoration projects. Being a DIY person, I also need a large range of fasteners to work on the house, appliances, cars, and other such things. Even as I write this, the remote control for an over head fan in the bedroom is not working. I know how to fix it, but can’t find the tiny Phillips screwdriver I need to take it apart. I know it is somewhere, but its exact location doesn’t seem to be stored in my overloaded brain.
Think of screws. There are a great number of types, sizes, and materials. Put “types of screws” or “type of fasteners” into your computer, and you will be impressed. Over the years I have acquired a large collection of them, and the tools necessary to insert them, but have neither the space nor the patience to keep them nicely sorted in individual packages or drawers. Hardware stores can do that, but if you buy such things, you find that even there, nuts, bolts, and screws sneak into the wrong container. At my home, they seem to wander randomly around my shop and my projects, even though I have assigned them to various places.
t seems to me that finding screws and related screwdrivers used to be simpler. I remember my early experience with screws, which was working with either my grandfather, the blacksmith and carpenter, or my uncle, the machinist. Granddad, in his shop had a single drawer full of different size flat head and round head screws. My uncle had the same in his shop, but of course also “machine” screws, including both fine thread and coarse thread screws, mostly with slotted heads. They of course each had several screw drivers, but mostly the classic types that fit screws with a slotted head.
Obviously a great amount of creativity has gone into the development of screws since my youth. And different types of screws better serve specialists for reasons ranging from the assembly process of machines to restricting usage to various specialists. Creativity! But as you know by now, I am not only a hobbyist who encounters many type of screws, I am also often involved in repairing, or attempting to repair everything from yard furniture through automobiles and digital equipment. I have a pretty complete set of standard, Phillips, hex and Torx screw drivers, but do not have enough space in my shop to cover all of the other geometries with proper drawers and appropriate screw drivers. A particularly maddening one is the Pozidrive, which looks very much like the Phillips head, but has a socket that is straight, rather than tapered. The Phillips head will slip if a certain amount of torque is put on it. The Pozidrive will hang on until the screw driver is bent. Much is made by the manufacturers that one should not use a Phillips screw driver on the Pozidrive screw and vice versa. But at first glance, they appear identical.
But are we getting too creative with our fasteners? I refuse to buy a Pozidrive screwdriver set. I have so many sizes and types of screwdrivers already that they are already overflowing the magnetic bars I keep them on, and I want to focus my time on my job, not on finding the right screwdriver. I am cutting down on the types of screws I use also, rather than drowning in screws and screwdrivers.
If one thinks about the totality of so-called hand tools, the same thing has happened universally, as well as in my shop. Before I went to high school, I owned a hammer, a couple of chisels, a drill and some bits, a pliers, a few screw drivers, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a couple of saws. Granted I was given access to my Uncle’s and/or grandfather’s shops If I was drafted to work on the house or tractor. When I went to high school, I inherited a quite used Chevrolet car, and added a minimal socket set, a depth gauge, and a few other tools that fit easily in the corner of the trunk of the car and carried me through college, although I began working summers in a machine shop, which introduced me to machine tools and dozens of “hand” tools I had not known existed.
But when I went into the Air Force I bought a used Austin Healey, which required pretty constant mechanical work, and which introduced me to the metric system and the British system of nuts, bolts, and such things, since they were all used on the car Lots more tools. Jacks, body tools, electrically powered tools, etc. Since then I seem to have acquired at least one of every tool I have ever needed, or wanted and could afford, and have finally realized that I would be more productive with fewer of them.
Is this in a sense an anti-creativity move on my part? Maybe. but at this point in my life I need to hold still and focus on fewer tools that I can find easily and are well sharpened and ready to go , rather than constantly filling spaces with a wider variety of them. Part of creativity is making choices and ”paring down”, and that is a difficult thing for me to do.
Some years ago, I was a consultant to an interesting group of people called the National Inventors Council, which consisted of outstanding inventors, and acted as a sounding board for the U.S. Department of Commerce. The person that held it together was named Dan DeSimone, and there was agreement in the group, and even in congress, that it was time for the U.S. to switch to the metric system of measurement, since most of the world had, and it is a far more reasonable system than we use. I became sensitized to cost of maintaining both the U.S. and metric systems of measurement. In the late 1960’s Dan directed a large study entitled “A Metric America. A decision Whose Time has Come”. The U.S. tried, but could not deal with it, so here we are, one of the only three countries in the world who do not use the metric system (the others are Liberia and Myanmar}. I sometimes think about how much simpler life would be if I could get rid of my U.S .system tools. But it won’t happen, any more than the QWERTY keyboard will.
The cost to us in maintaining our weird and primitive system, based on things such as the length of a thumb joint of a long-forgotten king (the inch), and the length of his foot (the foot, of course,) is enormous. One small benefit of changing to the metric system, is that we could instantly cut down on the number of fasteners and associated tools in the country. This has little chance of happening, since we have all grown up with our ancient and silly system, but it would be an excellent example of “creativity by paring down” for us, even though the rest of the world is already there. Perhaps I will discuss this in a later post.
I shall continue this in my next post by making an analogy with computers, which after all, are tools.
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