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Useful Tools
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
35 USEFUL TOOLS t seems like every Sunday there’s a Sears sale ier stuck in the newspaper. On the back page, past the ads for polyester clothing,kitchenappliances,andsnowtirescometheCraftsmantools. There are always a few specialty tools, vise-grips, torque wrenches and such, with their own individual pictures. But the highlight of the tool section is a big half-page picture offering richly arrayed complete Craftsman tool sets. Ranks of standard sockets, metric sockets, deepwelledsockets ,foam-linedsparkplugsocketsstandreadytoserveme. Behind the sockets are the various socket driving devices—swivelheaded , ratcheted, screwdriver style, shorty. Fanned sets of screwdrivers both at-blade and Phillips, Allen keys, open-end and box wrenches, standard and metric, are offered as inviting side attractions . All these stout tools parade in front of a multidrawered tool box, promising a lifetime warranty of usefulness, of jobs well done. I 36 They’re good tools.A good tool invites you to take it up.I felt the urge in an art supply store while looking at a cabinet of woodworking tools, sharp gouges with balled wooden handles.A sign warned me they were sharp, to ask a salesperson for assistance. And while I knew this sign was true, that these tools would quickly nd their way into the soft esh of my hands, I wanted to take them up and handle them. Seeing them, I believed I could carve. A good tool is beautiful to work with, though not necessarily beautiful to look at. I think I see its beauty by imagining its use.The bamboo y rod when broken down is a clumsy collection of sticks. Put together,it’s a gangly thing threatening to poke an eye out,or to run itself against a tree trunk or topple underfoot and get broken. The only place it makes sense, the only place it can do its work is on the open space of a river. A good tool can often be a simple thing. Remember the six basic machines from General Science class? The wedge, the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the incline plane, the screw. Only I don’t think of any of these as machines at all. I hold with Scott Russell Sanders’s idea that a tool is used by hand, which is to say it has few moving parts and no motor. An Eskimo harpoon is such a tool, a good tool, elegant in its simplicity. Its toggled head represents a breakthrough in human ingenuity.When such a harpoon strikes an animal, the head comes free of the shaft and swivels onto its side, becoming a barb that’s hard to pull out. A harpoon, a claw hammer, an axe, a bicycle spoke wrench, even a Sears Craftsman socket set—these are the kinds of tools I like. I don’t trust myself around machinery; I cut the little wood we use [3.239.119.159] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:53 GMT) 37 in our inefcient stove with an axe and handsaw, then split it with a maul.The advantage to these tools is that they allow me to work at my easy pace,not the pace of a machine.They let me work within my limited human strength.When I nd myself jumping on the handle of a lug wrench because my truck has come back from the shop with its wheels put on with an air gun, I see how readily a machine seizes the advantage over a human. I’m not sure what sort of tool a y rod is. A long, long lever maybe, something like the throwing boards that both Eskimos and Greeks and who-knows-who else devised to throw spears farther. Except a y rod transfers its force to a exible line, not a rigid shaft. A y rod delivers its force at its tip-top where it drives the line along forward and back—greater force equals more line over a longer distance.The line itself rolls that power down its length until the nearly weightless leader and y take what little energy is left and oat out softly over the water.A well-executed cast looks so elegant, so simple. It pretty much is, which is why, while people keep trying to make y rods out of different materials, the idea of the rod has remained the same. Until graphite came along, the best y rods were still made from Tonkin cane, a kind of bamboo, seasoned and split and planed and...