December 2, 2005

• Kiss my Axe, part 2

  Some of you have been impressed by my so-called “skill” in affixing a
  new handle to Doug’s axe, even though I told the story straight,
  revealing all my doubts, deficits and deficiencies in that
  department.  Could you have guessed that the story wasn’t over yet?

  That same night, after I’d gone to bed, in the hypnogogic state in
  which many of my greatest inspirations come, I popped up off the pillow
  and said, “I know what I did wrong!  I put the head on upside
  down.”

  Doug picked up the axe, looked at it, and said, “No, the logo (stamped maker’s mark) is right side up.”

  In my exhausted and frustrated condition, not really wanting to tackle
  the job all over again, I accepted his verdict and went to sleep. 
  I didn’t even think about it again until he came in yesterday from
  splitting firewood before I left for the clinic and showed me that only
  one of the three screws was still there that we had driven into the end
  of the handle where the wedge should have gone.

  The screws I had driven at each end of the slot for the wedge had
  worked loose and gone… somewhere.  The third screw, in the
  center of the slot, had been so hard to drive that I’d quit after
  getting it set in position and left the rest to Doug.  He had
  driven it as far as he could, and stripped out the head trying to drive
  it deeper.

  There it stood, mute but eloquent testimony to a job done half-assedly,
  when I got home yesterday afternoon.  Using my Craftsman
  “Professional” titanium phillips screwdriver and a lot of physical
  force, I managed to torque it back out with its spun-out head. 
  Grrrrrr.  My universe sometimes seems filled with cross-threaded
  bolts, spun-out screw heads and stripped gears.  Is it just me, or
  is that just reality?

  When I looked at the maker’s mark, I could see that it read
  right-side-up if you held the head with it’s cutting edge downward,
  which had nothing to do with which way the handle went through the
  head.  Using (“misusing,” my father and my fourth husband Hulk,
  the carpenter, would say) my framing axe, I knocked the axehead off its
  handle yet again for about the sixth or seventh time and started
  shaving away still more excess wood.  This time, I had found my
  wood rasp and the job went a lot more smoothly than had the whittling
  with the fighting knife.

  When I got it pared down to the point where it would slip (with some
  force applied by the blunt end of the framing axe) through the narrow
  end of the axehead’s tapered hole, I put the head on the handle the
  right-way-round this time.  There was plenty of room inside the
  broader end of that tapered channel for me to wedge the handle’s split
  end open, and this I did.  Then I rasped and sanded the end of
  handle and wedge down even and smooth, making it all look, in the end,
  quite professionally done.

  There is, I must admit, some satisfaction to having gotten a job done
  right.  That satisfaction, I confess, wouldn’t have been so laced
  with chagrin if I’d managed to do it right the first time. 
  Hmmmm….  That could be the story of my life.
  

  • 2:27 pm
  • 6 Comments