I’ll be using many sharp-edged power tools all afternoon. I started out with all ten fingers. I’m always amazed when I finish with all ten after repeated use of power saws, power drills, routers, and all kinds of whirling dervishes that could snatch away a digit so fast I wouldn’t even see it happen.
I once disdained power tools. Anything made with power tools you couldn’t honestly call hand-crafted, was my thought. The problem with that kind of snobbery is, you’ve got to have the talent that enables you to cut a straight line, and although I can reasonably fake a straight line, I have to admit a power saw cuts a line much straighter and cleaner than I ever could.
You would also need a set of muscles like steel cable and a bottomless supply of stamina to saw and saw and saw all day long, to say nothing of how much driving a half-dozen screws takes out of you. I used to be able to do that but I’ve got the limp, creaky wrists of an old lady now. With a circular saw and a power drill I can keep at the job all day long.
And that’s why I’ve been collecting power tools lately, most of them at estate sales. I broke down several years ago and bought a brand-new router off the shelf, but the power miter saw that’s turned out to be more massively awesome than atomic-powered rocket ships was something I managed to score at an auction for just forty bucks.
I used it to turn a whole bunch of perfect good select lumber into rails for a pull-out set of drawers so My Darling B could not only store her canning jars in the kitchen cupboards, but so she could get to them without having to worry about the flimsy cardboard boxes they were stored in breaking apart and getting bonked on the head by a bunch of jars. The cupboards she stores them in are way over her head and she has to stand on tippy-toe, even on her step-stool, to get the boxes out. I whacked together some durable pine drawers and mounted them on rails. Now she can pull them out and there’ll be no bonking going on in the kitchen.
Or maybe that didn’t come out right.
This Is Drivel 