Too many

mickri said:
One grandson loves to make stuff. Loves tools. He just turned 6. I always give he some kind of tool for Xmas and birthdays. He's been learning how to use a hand drill this spring. If somebody has some construction happening on their street he puts on his tool belt and goes down to watch. He might want my stuff. Who knows.
Click to expand...
Now there is a rare bird in this day and age. I hope you get hang with him and feed his budding urge to make something. My grandfather and my uncle were both mechanics but my poor dad had ten thumbs. But bless his heart he had tools(even though he didn’t really use them) and my brother ended up a plumber/machinist and I a mechanic /fabricator. He just fed the proclivities I guess. It worked out great for him because we took care of his stuff. Smart man :)

My dad was a potato chip salesman so he had tons of boxes. One whole wall of the garage was shelves with a solid wall of boxes. Not a single one had anything marked on them :( Every year my mom and dad would load up their trailer and go fishing all over the western US for a month. So I knew 1/4 of the garage was filled with bogus junk in those boxes so I waited for them to go on vacation and we got a dumpster delivered to the house and got rid of all that junk. One box was assorted oddly bent coat hangers. Another had a flat 4 square ball and broken squeegee. That was just a hint of what was in those 30 some odd boxes and not one of them had anything useful or were over a quarter full. We called it organized stealth hoarding.
 
Organized Stealth Hoarding
That is a GREAT one
 
It was funny that I’d not thought of organized stealth hoarding for 40yrs. Even funnier, organized stealth hoarding…OSH :)
 
Well the really cool thing is it brought up your Dad, and you related a great story, that brought laughter and more talk about your Dad.
 
I have TAS, tool acquisition syndrome. And like all addicts I can quit at anytime and have quit a thousand times. Until the next insane deal comes along. My last was this 5 drawer flat file cab for ….$25.
 

Attachments

  • EF3A5718-CB4A-41C8-B24B-09FEAF60D7BF.jpeg
    EF3A5718-CB4A-41C8-B24B-09FEAF60D7BF.jpeg
    28.8 KB · Views: 7
Eyerelief said:
OSH! Oh man! I might have that
Click to expand...
See, that’s a fine line that I am always watching. I recognized early on in order to be like your mentor and his crew you needed a good stock of materials to pull from in order to solve problems. So there is a difference between OSH and MAS (material acquisition syndrome). OSH is a box of oddly bent coat hangers and MAS is a pile of steel at a ridiculous cheap price. Yes to our better half it looks a lot the same but they do not occupy the same space in the universe. One will forever take up valuable space in the shop never to be repurposed, the other will be pulled upon to make a much needed gate, legs for the flat file, a reciprocating sheetmetal forming machine etc etc.

Unfortunately it’s always a fight with my DNA to useless hoard and my trained repurpose of that urge into “collect” the useful for future projects. Luckily I’ve been able to demonstrate to my best half the difference. She always asks me “what are you going to do with that?” and if I don’t have a good answer she talks me down. It doesn’t happen often but it does help she is a psychologist.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top