Old Tools

It’s a Monday bank holiday morning in the UK and a regular - somewhat regular - working day here in Poland.

I’ve just finished putting together my workbench out of scrap kitchen top and some 35mm box steel I welded into a frame. I’ve also taken the time to chop up the cot for my second child, because she now has a double mattress to herself and, frankly, doesn’t fit in the cot anymore.

During the move over here, I was stuck for time. I couldn’t find the hardware to put her cot together properly, so I grabbed the nail gun and some glue and reinforced the whole thing far beyond what I actually intended. So much so that I can’t get it apart without ripping it to bits. It is now built more solidly than any other piece of furniture in the house, which is quite interesting for something that is essentially MDF and pure uncensored grit, assembled under time pressure without the appropriate parts.

So I grabbed my reciprocating saw and went at it. I got about a quarter of the way through before it became clear this was the swan song for my reciprocating saw. Smoke was pouring out of it. It was chewing up battery power. The blade could keep going, but the motor just couldn’t do it anymore.

I’ve had that reciprocating saw for about five years. It was a wedding present from a friend of mine. He couldn’t join us due to Covid restrictions, but with his spoiled American big-box-store culture, he got me a huge kit of introductory Ryobi tools and shipped them over. I’ve been using them ever since and that reciprocating saw has been with me a while.

I used to think it was some cheap, unsophisticated bit of nonsense and I couldn’t see the point. Especially when, during my first few uses on thin garden trees, the blade would get stuck and do nothing more than vibrate everything violently, causing more of a mess and getting me no closer to cutting whatever I was working on.

Eventually I upgraded the blade and I ended up picking up the saw again for demolition work where my circular saw was too dangerous to use. The first big challenge was ripping down the boomer shed at my old UK property, which was a ridiculously over-engineered idiot structure that did nothing more than house spiders and take up a prime position in the garden.

That all got ripped to pieces and within a couple of days I had demolished the entire structure and shipped it off to the dump - along with stories I will take to my grave. Things like finding thick fibreglass insulation in the walls but nothing in the roof. Or discovering that a barely two-metre-high shed on a tiny eight-by-six block had a concrete base doubly reinforced with about 6mm rebar and then an additional 3mm steel mesh, all for nothing more than a six-inch slab with no sub-base underneath. That whole shed is something I can complain about forever and I have the video evidence to demonstrate how stupid it was. And that reciprocating saw took me through it.

It reminds me of my early days, when I used a small Windows laptop and a Cloud9 browser-based Linux environment to teach myself to code after many years of being screwed around by lying developers. I’ve moved on now to a full desktop setup with triple widescreen monitors and my own personal Kubernetes cluster running in a single server rack I own and host on premises in my home, where I’ve even welded up my own racks and castors to make it easy to manoeuvre.

That Cloud9 environment was still functional and I still look back at it just as fondly and with just as much respect, even though I’ve moved past it. The same goes for this reciprocating saw. It’s dug out hard roots of blackthorn bushes, cut down dead trees, decimated said boomer shed and now it’s time for me to move on to the next, more powerful version, as I’ve moved ahead from these introductory tools.

It is still a bit melancholy, though and there’s an aspect to this that makes me feel like it deserves some sort of send-off. But I’m not quite sure what that looks like. The same can be said of me.

Right now I’m sitting on a patio that is poorly put together, has no sub-base and is completely overgrown. There’s no other way to put it: this is utter garbage put together by idiots who did a shit job. So I’ll rip out all the weeds, rip up all the pavers, lay down an actual sub-base - because you should have a sub-base - and re-lay and seal the whole damn thing. It will bring a bit of order into the world. But once I’m gone, whatever I left behind will also decay and it will all return to the same mess eventually.

And that’s okay, because in this short moment of time where I’m here and can enjoy it, it brings a little bit of order and sanity and peace where before there was just a shit patio.

The reciprocating saw is an entry-piece, probably less than £100 RRP and I got the value out of it and gave it some purpose and some stories, which I won’t ever forget. But it’s dead now and it’s time for me to move onto the next step onwards. And that new saw will have the big list of benefits and features that quantify it as better than my old reciprocating saw, the new one still needs to prove its worth the same way the old one did.