It’s funny, but why are DIYers always either portrayed as brilliant or stupid? Personally, I imagine myself kinda in the middle; there are lots of things I don’t know, but I’m not going to glue myself to everything in the shop, either.
FWIW, this ad does come from Toyota South Africa. Maybe they have a different take down there — they’re certainly willing to buy some ugly cars (assuming the one in the ad sells well).
From what I hear, a crane operator over-extended his load, toppling the crane and dumping its load on this hapless Toyota. Check the link below for more photos, though be warned: They’re hosted by a site that’s advertising bent and not always safe for work. That said, the linked page was SFW when I last checked.
“Oops,” Said the Crane Operator [Knutz.net]
Related:
I came across this on Digg this morning. Apparently no one owned up to actually being related parentally to the kids in the photo, though that’s probably no surprise.
Just a thought: What if it’s not their living room?
Related:
And you wonder why most workers would rather crap in a bathtub or piss in the bushes than use the PortaJohns on most jobsites. Now you know.
It seems like YouTube is chock-ass full of people hurting themselves with tools. The question I always find myself asking is, "Why were they videotaping these incidents?" I mean, do you generally have a buddy tape you while you're digging a trench or sliding some plywood onto the roof? (Or do you say, "Hey, jackass -- put down the camera, come over here, and help!")
Anyway -- check out the video, and learn at least five more things not to do while doing it yourself.
Recent (Video) Doh!:
Past Doh!:
Laugh if you will, but you know damn well that this kind of thing has happened to you before. Maybe you didn’t hit yourself in the face with the drill, but how many of you haven’t whacked your hand on something because a drill bit grabbed tight? And don’t even get me started about pneumatic wrenches…
This one’s self-explanatory. I’ve seen a number of “accidents” with Bobcat-style small loaders; for some reason, most people don’t think they require the same care in operation as their larger cousins.
Look at it this way — at least he wasn’t shoveling poo.
Still no response on an opportunity for Sean to check out a real bulldozer. C’mon — I’m sure at least one of you out there has one that he could take for a spin!
The Herald Sun reports that “two firefighters and a third person were treated for burns after sparks from a grinder started a fire in Tasmania’s north” yesterday. Sadly, this is something with which I have some experience.
A number of years ago, I was trying to build my first trailer — a sad steel-and-plywood affair that I hoped my poor little Honda CRX would drag all the way to Florida from Texas — preferably without destroying all my Earthly belongings inside. A friend was helping me, and neither of us had any real welding experience — and we were using a stick welder.
Needless to say, we were doing a lot more grinding than we were welding. To make a long story short, I managed to set the decorative grass along my Father’s driveway on fire.
Before I get into details, let’s start by giving those in this post (who shall remain nameless) a get-out-of-jail-free pass. Everyone who’s ventured into metalwork knows how easy and tempting it is to “over-engineer” designs. Let’s face it: It takes far less volume of metal to do the same job than it takes wood, and sometimes it takes a while for this concept to sink in.
Two prime examples:
A friend of a friend had a wheelbarrow. After years of heavy use, the wheel bracket finally rusted and came apart. Thinking that fixing it would be a great use for his new flux-core welder (right), he proceeded to fab up a new one — from 1/2″ plate (doh!). When he finished, it was quite sturdy — to say the least — but the new bracket weighed more than the entire wheelbarrow did before. It was hard to push even when empty. (He also did the same kind of thing with a string trimmer later…)
Another friend — who should’ve known better as he has far more experience in fabrication than most people I know — decided to build a sunshade for his lawnmower. Why get a sunburn every time you mow or spend zillions on a sunshade — assuming they even make one for your ‘mower? Why indeed. He built one out of 11 gauge square tube, which is quite heavy. Between the heavy material and the height of the design, the mower became quite top heavy. In fact, the first time he drove it out of the shop (and down a slight ramp to the yard) it flipped over on its back.
The lesson to be learned here is that more is not necessarily better. Even if you’re not a mechanical engineer, you can make an educated guess as to what type of material will best suit your job — and add no more weight or bulk than’s necessary. This “minimal” type of design will produce more usable items — especially if they’re designed to be carried around or otherwise human-motivated in use.
Have you seen any over-engineered projects recenty? Drop us a line — or better yet a photo.
This one comes from the family history files: My father and an uncle were doing some carpentry work on the side to help fill the space under the Christmas tree, and part of the job involved removing the flat roof from a poolside building and replacing it with a new roof that’d better shed snow and rain.
When I showed up to help, I had the dubious honor of pointed out that they’d managed to build their ladder right into the new roof. They’d been leaning the ladder up against the building, and when they installed the new rafters, they installed one right through the ladder. Doh!
Thankfully they had a good sense of humor about it, even after having put in a tough evening of sawing and nailing — after a full day of normal work.
Note: We could use some help in coming up with “Doh!” of the Week material. Thankfully we seem to be incapable of generating a “Doh!” each week on our own, so why not use our contact form to send us your “Doh!” moment? If you’d like it to remain confidential, just say so and we’ll protect the guilty. Either way, if we use your “Doh!” we’ll send you a little something in the mail.
We’ll freely admit it — now, anyway. This is something we did right here in our shop. We were replacing a Porsche 944S2 water pump — one of the most frustrating and difficult jobs in the automotive world short of removing, rebuilding, and re-installing an engine. What makes the job so difficult is the fact that the Porsche’s water pump is located underneath just about everything on the front of the engine including the timing belt, the balance shaft belt, two accessory belts, and a bunch of other stuff.
So, having dutifully removed all this mess — and having suffered through the difficulty of finding #1 TDC on a car with an aftermarket flywheel without markings — we finally got the twelve (!) bolts off and removed the water pump. Then we installed the seal, bolted it back up, and put everything back on the car — without bothering to check it for leaks.
As you can imagine, when we finally got the whole thing together the next day and filled it up with coolant, it leaked like a sieve.
Hey, it only set us back two freakin’ days. But we’re not mad. Not at all. We’re sitting in our calm, happy place right now, taking the time to offer you this great piece of advice:
If you’re installing a part that’s underneath half the engine, test it for leaks before you reassemble.
That is all.
PS: Oh yeah, and don’t buy a 944 unless you’re really, really serious about expanding your tool kit. The word “special tool” appears over 1,000 times in the car’s repair manual — assuming you managed to find a repair manual.
A friend (who’ll remain nameless here, but can own up to it in comments if he wishes) shared this with us over the weekend. When we heard it, we knew we had our “Doh!” of the Week.
In a hurry to clean up his apartment before a guest arrived, he noticed that there was some black stuff on his gas range’s burner grates. When the standard cleaner didn’t get it off, he tried some WD-40, forgetting that the pilot lights were still on.
Poof! Instant fire. Lesson learned: Turn off the pilot lights before cleaning a gas range with explosive chemicals.
After last week’s “Doh” — dropping an advil on your foot — other readers wrote in to share similar experiences where they moved something heavy without first thinking it through. Some of their objects of destruction: a motorcycle and a transmission.
Thanks to everyone who owned up to their mistakes this week. If you have the guts to fess up — and we publish your entry here as our “Doh!” of the Week — we’ll send you something from the tool pile.
I guess it was a pretty safe week out there among Toolmongers because only a couple of you stepped up to admit your mistakes. Or maybe you’re just afraid we’ll laugh at you. Well, we will indeed laugh. But just to let you know how we’re laughing with you and not at you, we’ll share a story of our own.
We keep a 150 lb. anvil in the shop for a lot of reasons, the main one being that there’s absolutely nothing better to use when you need to beat on something than an anvil. It’s far better than the driveway, workbench, or anything else in the shop. We were moving it around to use it in a tool test, and, well, let it get away from us.
One of us had the stand and the other had the anvil, and we managed to get tangled up in each others feet and trip. The bad news is that once a 150 lb. anvil gets moving it’s pretty hard to stop. Thankfully it didn’t get completely away from us and we managed to push it to the side a bit so that it only landed partially on one of our calf muscles as opposed to square on it.
Reader Dean says:
“I ran over my dog with a belt sander once. Plugged it in, and it was then that I found out that the trigger was locked and it was belt-side down. My dog refuses to come into the barn anymore.”
For submitting our favorite “Doh!” this week Dean’ll receive a ProTouch retractable utility knife courtesy of Irwin. (We figure that since he’s had already had some experience with utility knives, he’ll be safe now.)
We have some more of these great utility knives around the office, so if you’d like one, just add your favorite (and most entertaining) “Doh!” experience in comments below. We’ll select another winner next Monday.
We’d laugh, but we did almost the same thing last week:
Reader Weldo Says, “Do not wire weld in shorts, a tank top, and sandals. Not saying I did that, but if I had, the little burns from the slag would be on their way to healing pretty well. Man, I bet that would have hurt.”
In my case I was wearing tennis shoes. Hey, it was only a quick weld, right? Slag caught my shoe right in the mesh part, and by the time I managed to take it off it was gettin’ a bit toasty inside. I was uninjured (except my pride — dancing around the shop hollering “get it off get it off get it off” doesn’t do much for that), but I did change into some leather-uppered boots.
Welcome to our first round of Toolmonger’s “Doh!” of the Week where we’ll gather up reader mail (and our personal experiences) to bring you some tales of folly in the shop.
First of all, thanks to all those users who’ve stepped up to share their pain with everyone both to entertain and to help us all avoid stepping in the same cold, slush-filled pothole. And special thanks to readers Rick and Tyrone who really threw down the gauntlet in comments to get the ball rolling.
This week’s theme: kids in the shop.
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