Duh

[jducoeur]

You ever have one of those moments when you realize you have done something so staggeringly dumb that you are forced to introspectively wonder if your brain has been replaced by Waldorf salad when you weren't looking? This is one of those moments.

Oh, well -- no damage done, and nothing wasted except a bunch of time. And it feels wonderful when a Major Crisis that is making me crazy dissolves into mist...

Comments

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

You realize with a setup like that, not giving details so we can revel in all the staggering glory makes you seem a tease? :)

And yeah, they reason we can appreciate it is that we've probably all been there, at one time or another, and affirmation that we're in good company is always handy.

[jducoeur]

Yeah -- it just takes a few minutes to get past the embarassment. But just to put this squarely into the "lessons learned" category:

Having promised Luke that I'd help arch at Pennsic, and gone to the work of getting myself authorized, the major remaining task is getting my armor up to snuff. The marshals authorized me at GNE, but made it clear that the armor wouldn't pass inspection as it stands. And the most common complaint was the chin strap. The crappy strap I had in there sufficed in the old days when I was just scouting, but it's not good enough now.

Well, pretty much everyone agreed that the main problem was that the strap was hooked into the helm wrong. One hole on each side of the head, fairly high up, just didn't give a strap good purchase. Several people recommended that I needed two holes on each side, down by the bottom of my ears instead.

Okay, sez I, let's go drill some holes. I've never drilled steel before, but how hard can it be? So I get some titanium drill bits that claim to go through metal, and I start drilling.

And I drill, and drill, and drill. Oh, it's making some progress, but it's vanishingly slow: I can watch little specks of metal flake out, but after some minutes I've only drilled down a neat little indentation. So I figure I have the wrong bit, go back to Home Despot and get a different one. And I keep drilling -- no luck. I drill until my hands are going numb from the vibration, and it continues to make progress Ever -- So -- Slowly.

Finally, at the end of my rope, I consider my options. Maybe this really shouldn't be done with an ordinary drill? It is fairly thick steel, after all. Well, I don't know what other tool to try. Maybe my assumption that I should be doing this at high speed is wrong, and I should try a lower speed? Doesn't make much sense, but I reach down to reduce the speed, and I notice the label on the drill.

The label that says, "Reversible Engine".

And I ask myself, "Self -- what are the odds that the last thing you did with this drill was remove nails?" So I flip the little switch, and *poof*: in four seconds flat I accomplish more than half an hour (or more) of determined struggle had done previously...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear it! But yea -- BT, DT. Hopefully your drill bit has forgiven you. ;-)

(Just be glad it wasn't a bolt that you spent half an hour trying to loosen by torquing *clockwise*...I've seen heads snapped off by people who just couldn't! get! it! loose!)

If you need leather working tools or scraps, they're available over here -- I wasn't clear from your description if you had the strap built or not.

[jducoeur]

Thanks for the offer, but at this point I think I've pretty much got it -- might fiddle with the shaping a bit, but it seems reasonable. I picked up basic leather tools a few weeks ago, and went down to Walter Dyer and got an enormous bag of scrap leather cheap...

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

If it's any solace, I've done that same trick with the drill bit. I don't think it took me quite as long to figure out, though, but subjective time can be hard to gauge.

And yeah, chin straps are important. The only real injury I got while fighting heavy list was the result of an inadequate chin strap, among other factors.

Unbelievably common...

[chiefoperator.livejournal.com]

You have NO IDEA how many people have done just what you did - basically every technician and engineer here has done it at least once, and some of the stories are doozies.

What helps, of course, in these situations, is knowing what to expect, which radically increases the speed with which you realize that something has gone wrong... I was making cookies one time, and the recipe instructed me to "melt" some brown sugar in butter. What it really wanted was to just toss it in there and slush it around, but NO, I had to ACTUALLY try to melt it, which takes a FANTASTIC amount of heat, and basically generates a caramel substance which hardens to a rock the second you stop stirring it and it's junk and you have to throw it out and start over again...

Re: Unbelievably common...

[jducoeur]

Heh -- yes, definitely one of those "cooking for engineers" moments. It had never really occurred to me that cooks pretty consistently use "melt" when they really mean "dissolve"...

[its-just-me.livejournal.com]

That's about a fifth of my day.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Yum, Waldorf Salad.

[tafkad.livejournal.com]

Some years ago, I decided I needed a theme song. I went with "I feel stupid, oh so stupid . . ."

Problem was, too many people accused me of stealing their theme song.