As a hands-on guy, I find myself working late nights, pounding, welding, and grinding away at any of my cars and trucks. It's what I like to do. But sometimes, I have my reasons for hurrying, because there's always more work than time. In these moments of haste, we often cut corners to buy some much-needed time. And sometimes, it ends up costing twice the time and sometimes more.
Last weekend I was prepping some body panels on my truck. I was removing Bondo from the side panels with a 6-inch wire wheel attached to a variable, high-speed grinder. This setup was making quick work of the unwanted body filler, so I pushed harder to get a deeper dig, and yes, the Bondo was that bad. I've been known to be hard on things, and without fail I found myself holding the variable speed grinder wide open to enhance the effectiveness of my filler-removal setup. This spun the 6-inch wire wheel a bit faster than the tool was designed for, and the wire strands started to dislocate from the wheel head. A couple strands even managed to lodge into my skin. The wire strands weren't coming out at a fast rate; just here and there. I thought nothing of pulling out a couple wire strands from my arm and continued ripping off the mud that some body pro decided the bedside needed.
As more and more of the wire strands dislodged from the wheel head, the faster the next strand came loose. A piece of hot metal came free of the body, hit me in the forehead, and just like you would see in a cartoon, the hot fragment bounced off my head then off the backside of the safety glasses I was wearing, and right in my damn eye. After trying to flush my eye with the entire bottle of my next-door neighbor's eye moisturizer, I took a bottle of mountain spring water and poked a small hole in the lid. After which, I carefully aimed the opening in the bottle cap at my eye and eased my grip tighter until I was strangling the harmless bottle of H2O. My eye burnedfrom the lack of saline, but seemed to feel much better. Little to my dismay, it only felt better because the burning from squirting water overwhelmed the irritation of the foreign object burned to the outer layer of my eye.
I spent the next two days rubbing my eye, knowing a visit to the doctor was on the agenda. By the time I got into the eye doctor a rust ring had started to form around the foreign metal particle that had fused itself to my eye tissue directly in front of the retina. The doctor took a quick look at the scenario through his microscope, placed a couple of drops in my eye, and then walked out of the room. Before the automatic door spring closed the door, he uttered, "Relax, I'll be back in a few moments." My eye instantly started to feel much better. I envisioned walking out the door with a prescription, a short-lived thought ruined when the doc walked back in with some utensils in hand. He dropped a couple more of the numbing drops in my eye, and he had me place my head back into cranium stabilizer so he could look closely at my predicament with the aid of magnification as he did once before. Only this time he pulled out a small hand drill with a tiny metal cutter on the end of it.
It was then he said, "I need you to be real still, and whatever you do, DON'T BLINK!" Those famous four letters starting with "S" and ending in "T" went through my mind. I asked him, "let me get this straight, you want me to let you carve on my eyeball without blinking, moving, or hitting you?" His reply set in my mind with a cold harsh reality. "You don't have to, but remember how you just completely failed the eye exam the nurse gave before I came in? That'll just be the beginning of your vision troubles should you leave the rusty debris in there."
As I watched that cutter slice away at the surface of my eyeball, I couldn't help but to think of all the projects my friends and I pushed to finish, just to make a show or some other deadline . Sleep-deprived zombies just going through the motions, we mindlessly relied on nothing bad happening. In fact, we were so focused on finish and fitment of truck parts, getting wounded never even made one neurosynaptic event on our brains. The whole experience was an eye-opener (pardon the pun) in relation to the lackadaisical way we take our lives for granted. Thanks to the powers that be, they provided me luck that saw me through the many years with minimal damage
To all you builders out there, if I could make this next statement seem any less mother like I would, but there's just no way to sugar coat "be careful". We'd like to see your killer new custom grace our pages with all those sick ideas and incredible craftsmanship.
Please feel free to write me. Diesel World Editor 265 S. Anita Dr., Suite 120 Orange, CA 92868 Or email me at:
As a hands-on guy, I find myself working late nights, pounding, welding, and grinding away at any of my cars and trucks. It's what I like to do. But sometimes, I have my reasons for hurrying, because there's always more work than time. In these moments of haste, we often cut corners to buy some much-needed time. And sometimes, it ends up costing twice the time and sometimes more.
