Tool definitions

[Iain]

Tools...


HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer continues to be the tool of choice for making medium sized circular depressions in wooden surfaces of all kinds.

UTILITY KNIFE: Used to slice through the fingers. For purposes of sanitation, the blades are easily replacable

ELECTRIC HAND DRILL: Normally used for stirring paint, this can also, with the proper accessories, destroy perfectly good wood in many ways.

PLIERS: Used to round off bolt heads, break thumbscrews and wing nuts on older woodworking machinery of all kinds. A subcategory of this definition is NEEDLENOSE PLIERS: These are an unusual tool with a very unusual property-when you need them they become invisible. See also NAILSET.

SABER SAW: One of a family of cutting tools built on the Ouija board principle. It transforms human energy into a crooked, unpredictable motion, and the more you attempt to influence its course, the more dismal your future becomes.

VISE-GRIPS: Used to round off bolt heads and crush irreplaceable parts.

BRAD POINT BITS: Used with the ELECTRIC HAND DRILL to make crooked, misaligned holes with flat bottoms.

FORSTNER BITS: Larger holes.

DRILL PRESS: A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, splattering it against that freshly finished part you were drying.

SANDERS:

BELT SANDER: Used for making rectangular gouges in wood.

PAD SANDER: Used for easing the edges of the rectangular gouges.

RANDOM ORBIT SANDER: Used for removing the marks left by the PAD SANDER, usually on any surface perpendicular to the original gouge. May also be used to make semicircular gouges in wood.

DETAIL SANDER: Makes triangular gouges, generally in blind corners where no amount of hand sanding can fix them.

TWEEZERS: A tool for removing wood splinters.

PHONE: Tool for calling your brother-in-law to see if he has your CLAMPS

TABLE SAW. Used to make wood slightly narrower than necessary.

MITER SAW: Used to make wood slightly shorter than necessary.

THICKNESS PLANER: Used to make wood slightly thinner than necessary.

JOINTER: Used to make wood too thin, too short, too narrow and perfectly straight. Very useful for making two sides of a board perfectly straight but non-parallell.

TROUBLE LIGHT: The mechanic's own tanning booth. Sometimes called a drop light, it is a good source of vitamin D, "the sunshine vitamin," which is not otherwise found under motorcycles at night. Health benefits aside, its main purpose is to consume 40-watt light bulbs at about the same rate that 105-mm howitzer shells might be used during, say, the first few hours of the Battle of the Bulge. More often dark than light, its name is somewhat misleading.

PHILLIPS SCREWDRIVER: Used to make textured marks in wooden surfaces.

SLOTTED SCREWDRIVER: Used to pry recalcitrant bolts and machine parts. Also useful for cleaning wood dust out of crevices.

AIR COMPRESSOR: A machine that takes energy produced in a coal-burning power plant 200 miles away and transforms it into
compressed air that travels by hose to a nail gun, which promptly puts the nail through a wire and halts the process with a bright blue flash. While this system will light your shop, it does not do so for any length of time.

PRY BAR: See SLOTTED SCREWDRIVER.

WORKBENCH: These are a form of tool with three stages;

1) An old door nailed to a pair of sawhorses of slightly differing height.
This is then used in the making of-

2) The European style workbench. Finely joined, with very expensive hardware (vises and the like), this is a project that takes a year or so to construct. Fine hardwoods must be found, miscut and replaced, hardware must be misaligned and bent, finish must be redone several times. When complete, it is a true masterpiece, and therefore remains in the center of the workshop under a dust cover (to prevent scratches) or else is placed in the center of the living room and dusted regularly (see SWMBO). Real work is done on-

3) A slightly more battered door nailed to a pair of sawhorses.....

DUST COLLECTON SYSTEM: Machine used to mix small parts with sawdust and shavings in a large canister or bag.

BISCUIT JOINER: Tool used to misalign wood in a very consistent manner which can then be sanded heavily (See BELT SANDER).

CHISEL: Multi use tool-good for making deep cuts in the hand or driving slotted screws.

POWER SCREWDRIVER: Used for rounding out Phillips screwheads at high speed.

CORDLESS DRILL: Related to NEEDLENOSE PLIERS in that whenever this tool is needed the battery is dead.

ROUTER: Used to darken wood by friction and make smoke. For this latter purpose, it replaces the incense used by primitive woodworking cultures who wished to influence the woodworking deities. When used with a ROUTER TABLE this tool can be used to make varying profiles using a single bit and a single depth setting.

TAPE MEASURE: This device is used to measure length. It should be immediately dropped onto concrete several times so that measurements made with it will then agree with every other TAPE MEASURE in the world.

STRAIGHT EDGE: Long, thin piece of steel or other hard material, this is useful for scraping large surfaces.

RECIPROCATING SAW: This tool is designed to make crude cuts in demolition work. It is therefore not all that surprising that it often cuts perfectly straight.

CIRCULAR SAW: This tool has three purposes.

1) Making almost straight cuts in wood.

2) Making strange-smelling smoke when in use.

3) Removing excess digits. Unexcelled for this purpose.

MORTISING MACHINE: Used to make square holes, sometimes where they are meant to be.

TENONING JIG: Used to make parts of a piece of wood into a size which will just fit into the mortise made with the MORTISING MACHINE.

DEADBLOW HAMMER or MALLET: Used to enlarge the pieces made with the TENONING JIG so that they are just barely too big to fit into a mortise.

RABBET PLANE: Used to change the 'slightly oversized' tenon (See DEADBLOW HAMMER) to greatly undersized.

NAILSET: Used to make small, round depressions around the head of a finish nail. Principally used for decoration.

CLAMPS: These come in two sizes:too small and loaned to an in-law.

WOOD STOVE: Originally designed to heat the workshop, these have evolved into a foolproof system for disposing of botched pieces of wood. This is one of the great advantages of woodworking over metalworking, as the only similar device in metalworking is a FOUNDRY.

WOOD STORAGE RACK: This is a device for keeping wood dry and protected on its way to the WOOD STOVE.