A well engineered and built tool is appreciated by the craftsmen that use it.  A tool that breaks while in use is discouraging, as well as dangerous.  You can seriously injure yourself.  Really, to do good work, you need good tools.

When you work with a poorly designed and built tool it is easy to recognize that the designer had no experience in the trade for which the tool was built.  However, I have seen some farm implements designed and built by a farmer, later manufactured and sold by a large equipment manufacturing company.

This can happen with hand tools also.  One tool that I built for myself to make my work life easier was later copied by a tool manufacturer.

One shop I worked for had a crew doing high voltage line work.  Whenever the high voltage line crew used a tool belonging to the low voltage crew, the tool would invariably come back broken, bent, or in pieces.  As well as with pieces lost.  That is one reason I am very reluctant to loan out tools.  Also, when you’re working in a large crew, it is not unheard of for a tool to get damaged, broken, or grow legs and walk off the job.

In one instance, I had purchased a new ½” EMT pipe bender.  I was careful to keep it near me at all times, laying it by my side as I worked.  Soon a large, heavy workman came by and stepped on it.  A piece was broken off that made the tool absolutely useless.  The portion that was broken was made of pot metal, making it irreparable.  It wasn’t so much that I had to purchase a new bender, but it was such a waste.

There was a scene played out in front of me on one job that had to do with tool usage.  One day a carpenter showed up on our job with a brand new 6’ level.  He was so proud of that thing.  I think he went around checking the level of everything just for the opportunity to use it.

He was standing on a ladder with the level leaning against the wall next to him.  A Native American fellow came in from doing cement work out back.  The Native American stopped and gazed longingly at the new level.

The conversation went like this:

“Hey Tim, can I borrow your level?”

Tim looked down and said; “What do you want to use it for?”

“I need to screed off some cement out back.”

There was a slight pause, and then Tim said: “If you use my level to screed off cement you will wish Custer had won!”

The Native American went outside chuckling to himself.

In the IBEW, you are limited to certain hand tools that you may carry with you, and or supply yourself.  Large tools are supposed to be supplied by the employer.  This situation can cause a certain amount of differences.

Some Union locals are very lenient and others very demanding in their interpretation of the requirements.  If the employer doesn’t have the tool you need, you are stuck; sometimes to the point of not being able to do your job.  The whole situation bothered me very much because I had made some of my hand tools myself.

For instance, I had engineered and created some wire pulling guides so that I could pull wire by myself.  The Union would not have liked to discover those tools.  From their perspective, it was better for the employer to hire another man for a man-and-a-half job.

If you damaged, broke, or lost some of your employer’s tools, it put you in a bad standing with him.

There were times when I was working on the Expo grounds in Spokane in 1974 that I observed some workers become “dissatisfied” with the tool they were using.  (either from damage to the tool or the ignorance of the user)  The tool was tossed into the river and reported as “lost” to the employer.

On other occasions, when a man was drafted by the military, he would toss his tools into wet concrete because he figured he was never coming back.

Lastly, if you supplied a better grade tool for yourself (personal hand tools) there was a very good chance that it would “walk off the job.”  As a result, while I was in the union, my personal hand tools were cheap grade.  I couldn’t afford to keep buying expensive ones for other people.

Sometimes though I have met and worked with people that help you retain your tools.  One time when I was putting conduit in a block wall while it was being built, I dropped some tools down the center of the blocks.  They went all the way to the bottom of the wall.

I was trying to figure out what to do, and how to get my tools back when the block layer saw my dilemma.  He offered to retrieve my tools for me.  He located where they were and slid a block horizontally out of the wall.  We were able to reach down and get the tools.

He had the option of doing this because the mortar was not yet set.  When I had retrieved the tools he used fresh mortar and reset the block.  That’s the kind of cooperation that makes a job go well.

When I started AdenBecks, and hired men to work for me, I started up-grading my tools, as I wanted the men to be productive.

So far, so good.

One of the painters I knew was very aggressive about finding work.  He would buy a lot in town, put down a foundation or a basement, go out in the country and buy a farm house that had been abandoned, bring it to town and set it on his foundation/basement.

I never asked how he knew what dimensions to make the foundation.

He would paint the house and hire me to update the electrical wiring, and then he would sell the home for a neat profit.  While I worked for him, I found some very interesting houses on which to work.

I believe I mentioned before how this man would sometimes replace the water heater; from electric to gas.  He allowed me to take home a working electrical water heater that was a niche heater.

A niche water heater is one that has a dry (inside) tube going through the water area.  The electrical water heater was inserted in this dry space and would “room heat” the water from there.  It was different in that the electrical water heating element never came in contact with the water.  This gave the element and thus the water heater a longer life expectancy.

This was the only niche water heater I have ever seen.  I still have it amongst my souvenirs.

A couple other painters I knew were brothers and worked together.  They were pretty sly pranksters.

One day after working on a job with them, I got home and found that the toes of my boots were painted.  It wasn’t that paint had dripped on them.  Nor that I had stepped in something.  The toes of the boots had been painted.  I couldn’t figure out what had happened.  I finally figured it out.

As I stood on a ladder, with my feet being just under head height, they had taken a few unnoticed moments to dob paint on and then paint the toes of my boots.  In fact I recalled that at one point in the day I had my ladder set up very close to the wall they were working on.  I suspect it didn’t take much of an inducement to just kind of reach across and over their shoulders to paint my boot toes in a passing manner.

One of these brothers had a son that moved into the Spokane area.  Years later he became one of my customers.

It used to be that the paint products used by painters exuded a very “criminal” odor.  Over the years the odor from paint has become less invasive or pronounced.

We used to wonder if the strong paint smell was a cause for a disproportionate number of painters that suffered from alcoholism.  If that was actually the case, I would imagine that with the decrease in paint odor, there has also been a decrease in the number of painters afflicted with alcohol dependence.