Appreciation For The Claw Hammer

First, let me assure you all that my tetanus shots are nicely up to date. Those nails were all pretty rusty! But I'm getting ahead of  myself.

We'd tried to sell the chair. Apparently everybody who looked at it knew what we knew about it, an accident waiting to happen. We tried giving it away. Same result. We even tried throwing it away, setting it next to the garbage can in hopes that the guys picking stuff up were in a generous mood. Nope. So it got stored on the patio for months, back in a large stack of other stuff needing sorting, tossing, whatever. 

It once was a really nice chair, a gift from a friend, rattan on wood frame, with some components that I'd label wicker. Really, I can't tell the two apart officially, but we have several wicker pieces of furniture, and the materials in them seem to be round and thicker than most of this old chair. Rattan and wicker have a history almost as old as human history, meaning it definitely predates the iron age. My point here is that furniture made with it was made for ages without need of nails. Perhaps those skilled craftsmen have all died out. This chair had around a hundred of the buggers. You want to know how I found out? Oops, ahead of myself again.

The cushion was the first to go, but then it came with the chair, which itself predated my wicker furniture by several years. The wicker, in turn, acquired cushions once we moved everything down here. The whole group became patio furniture, covered from rain unless wind blew it in under the roof, but not protected from the Arizona sun peeking under the roof edges for 9 months of the year. (In summer, we brought it all inside and locked the house up tight. It made vacations a bit more work, to be sure.) Anyway, the fabric rotted, so more cushions all around were purchased. Not too long after, the seat itself gave signs of starting to lose its strength, so we simply quit sitting in it. Mostly.

But now it was finally time to get rid of it. How? The other options hadn't worked, so we were down to demolishing it and feeding it into the garbage stream disguised as a Hefty Bag. That's worked for so many things these last few months. I took it on as my personal project. I've done my share of (mediocre) carpentry projects in my day. I've also done lots of tree trimming. Both combined to give me some knowledge of both hand and power tools and ability to use them. I know, for example, the difference between several different kinds of hammers, or which kind of cutting tools would serve the needs of this demolition best. 

For cutting, it turned out I needed all of them: a straight saw, short lopping pruners, and scissors. There was quite a variety of sizes and strengths of materials in this chair. Digging deep enough, I discovered there was even - gasp! - plastic strapping. That's definitely not old-school construction. Nor, it turned out, were all the nails!

Now I could show you exactly how I discovered the nails in this thing, but I can't remember exactly which part of me started bleeding first. Well, sure, it was on my hands, but then they all were. I kinda had my suspicions earlier when I was sawing the first leg off the chair. I heard this peculiar high pitched noise that, looking back, obviously was caused by my sawing through metal. Good thing it's a very sturdy saw! Those teeth are still sharp too, and none of them bent.

Fortunately, Rich was home this afternoon. He knows exactly where - uh - most of the household tools are stored these days. He's rearranged the workroom, and even has something of a path through there on good days. I needed a claw hammer, and was inordinately proud of myself for coming up with the exact term right off the bat. There are still days where the simplest words evade me anywhere from minutes to - ever. It took Rich less than a minute to provide me the hammer. It worked like a charm, most of the time. There were a few monster nails in impossible angles for one to work, so I left them for Rich. He has the knees and strength to pound them backwards to where they can be pulled. The little one inch nails had been used to secure the rattan in hundreds of places to make up for lack of skill by whoever was supposed to wind the stuff around the wood frame so it wouldn't gap or fall off. Yep, definitely a lost art.

Oh, did I mention I was barefoot? I had no idea where this task was going to take me back when I started. I had to warn Rich to put shoes on before heading out. He promised to bring out  a magnet for later to be sure all the nails were found, and he's still out there now working on that. You see, all the bits of curly rattan I cut off or broke off were dumped in a pile around me to be picked up later. And the little nails fell out of the hammer about a third of the times I pulled them out of the chair. Of course I knew where most of them landed, so when quitting time for the day arrived, I made myself a safe path back into the house. 

But again I'm getting ahead of myself. What I really want to do is give praise to whoever it was who invented the claw hammer. Now you might think it was developed either by or for an incompetent carpenter who couldn't even drive them in straight. You know, like that was a bad thing. But shame on you! Everybody has to start somewhere. Mistakes are how you learn, along with practice. Lots of practice. Driving a nail accurately requires developing muscle memory, and as far as I know, no baby was ever born with it, no matter how much of a carpentry genius it grew up into. Great carpentry takes work. 

My shoulder muscles are telling me it also takes a lot of work to remove nails for destructive purposes. Must be time for ibuprofin and TV. I hear there's an impeachment trial going on. I can work on the chair again tomorrow.