One of the least known periods of my life is the mid to late 70s when I worked as a mechanic in a factory. Strictly speaking, it was a mill, not a factory as we processed wool. We took bales of greasy wool from the shearing sheds to some finished products, like blankets.
My job was to keep fourteen machines running. I oiled and adjusted them, and when they stopped, I worked frantically to get them going again. Once a machine broke down and in the process cast off a nut, depositing it in a place where it would take a complete strip down to recover it. My then boss, an alcoholic Dutchman, opened his toolbox and deep inside was a nut, perfect for the job. I looked at my shiny new toolbox with its shiny new tools and wondered how one gets a useful collection of odds and ends, springs, washers nuts etcetera, to use in situations like this.
Yesterday I fitted an extension to my tablesaw and needed a spring washer to complete the job. And sure enough there at the bottom of my nuts and bolts drawer was the perfect spring washer. I had become my alcoholic Dutch boss.
In reality I have done similar things for years, hording stuff that just might be useful one day. Not hoarding in the reality TV sense, hoarding in a practical useful sense. Having a big workshop means I can go some way toward sorting the stuff and be able to find it. When I think back to the first workshop I was in, my grandfather's, it was only a bench at the end of his garage, but we made lots of useless stuff there, stuff a kid could think up and a grandfather could show how to make. The bench was cluttered with jars of nails and screws, sawdust, oil and fifty years of dirt, gave it a colour and a smell that I'd recognise today, fifty years later.
I hope one day, to have my workshop smelling like that and be able to find, that perfect thing, you know, the bit with the bend at the end with a hole in it. Whatever it is, I'll have it there, somewhere, I'll just have to keep looking.
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