About a year ago my wife bought this thing for the cat so he can sit outside without getting gone or getting eaten by the wild things in the world beyond. It was cheap (I think about $40 on clearance) and decently made except it had this stupid flat roof made out of MDF wrapped in roll roofing face screwed onto the top rails and nowhere for the water to go. She wanted it put up as is so whatever, and the cat loves it. Surprised it lasted as long as it did. After a year the top was near collapse, so time for a re-roof.
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One problem I have currently is stuff scattered across various buildings. The lumber is split between three buildings and the woodworking stuff is mostly at my house with a little bit at the common shop.
I used to do some furniture building but quit because I pretty much built everything we wanted, built for customers for long enough to pay for all the equipment a couple of times over, and quit after deciding customers in general are irritating to the point of sucking the joy out of a hobby sideline, turning it into just another job. So a lot of the woodworking stuff is crammed in one corner of my shop area. The lumber I needed for this project was at the common shop area. For this little roof deal I had to rip a 74” long 1” wide strip at a 4/12 angle to match the roof pitch so I rooted out the tablesaw and forked it to the common shop.
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It isn’t a fancy cabinet saw. It’s what I’d consider a two man contractor saw. As in you can pop the motor off in about 5 seconds and two reasonably fit guys can set it in the back of a pickup being it’s only about 275lb with the motor and somewhat less without.
It got me to thinking as I was driving away with the saw, why loader forks are better than friends:
- My forks don’t have chronic orthopedic problems that restrict their weight lifting to 50lb without complaining; 75lb with grumbling; 100lb intermittent with full on bitching. At my age, most of my friends do.
- My forks don’t have to ask their wife before coming over.
- If I want my forks to shut up, I can turn off the engine.
- My forks don’t expect return favors.
- If my forks don’t like the way I’m doing something, they mind their own business and don’t say anything about it.
- My forks don’t hang around forever after I’m ready for them to leave.
- My wife gets along great with my forks. She’s never accused them of being a bad influence; never asked where we’re going, what we’re doing, or when we’ll be back.
- Yes, I spent a few hundred dollars on my forks the first time I met them. Haven’t spent a dime on them since. They haven’t even asked to borrow money.
- They’ve been around me long enough now they have to have picked up on some of my more obvious faults but they never give me any crap about them.
- Forks can hand stuff from the ground straight to the roof on a one story.
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New roof. I’ll put the trim back on to cover the very effective, yet aesthetically unacceptable, Great Stuff after the paint on the new part is thoroughly dry. Yes, it slopes downhill. That was an unsuccessful attempt to maybe get the flat roof to shed water enough to not fall apart immediately.
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Then continued the almost done project of thinning out some of the overgrown landscaping at my father’s old house. 3 of the 4 people who live on the property disliked this bush. The fourth (me) didn’t care. Wonderful as the forks are, this was a job for the grapple. Took a short trip to the junk heap, then used the boxblade to fix up the hole left by the root ball. After that pulled a few T posts that were part of the electric fence around the beehives. Gave the bees away so don’t need the fence.
Edit: Maybe someday I’ll list off 10 reasons friends are better than forks. If I can come up with 10.
WTH!
