“Have you ever had to get creative when a tool was broken or you did not have the tool you needed at the jobsite?”
Bob Goldstein
Vermont Natural Coatings
I was working on installing stair treads when my caulking gun broke, and there were just two steps left to apply the urethane adhesive to. The job was too far from a store to buy a new gun, so I improvised by cutting notches in a piece of cove base, then cutting the tubes open and spreading the glue by hand. Necessity is the mother of invention, or sometimes just a “mother.”
Brett Miller
NWFA
We used to do a lot of work in the mountains of Colorado, which oftentimes were several hours from our shop, and frequently a distance from any distributor or hardware store. Driving back to get something we forgot was not usually an option.
I’m pretty sure everyone has lost the key to their super7 edger. Whether lost, stolen, or “borrowed” by one of our other guys, this seemed to happen all the time. The supplemental tool was usually either a wrench or my 9/16” socket, whichever was in my truck.
When my scraper was forgotten, lost, or “borrowed” by someone, it was more difficult to supplement, especially on a resand. I recall having to resort to a sharp chisel and coarse hand-sand paper to take care of the corners.
The worst though, was when this happened with one of my edger or big machine dust bags. Before the days of running dust containment on every job, we relied on our dust bags. All we ran back then was our backpack vacuum. I recall wearing the backpack vac, with the short hose taped to my edger, and the vacuum strapped to my back. This was the inconvenient process we took to learn the value of using dust containment on all of our equipment.