WHEN TOOLS ATTACK

After reading the Drag Racers Dictionary on the Heaven and Hell website, it got me thinking about my experiences with tools over the years.

I have been an HGV/PCV Auto Electrician for almost 30 years. In that time have come to believe that tools are invested with malevolent spirits which are out to cause you bodily injury and frustration whilst masquerading as aids to help you do your job quicker and more efficiently.

I have this mental picture of Snap On and Mac tool dealers receiving a new delivery of tools. They strip down to their branded boxer shorts and socks. Clutching a ½ in Breaker Bar with a skull head attached, they enter their vans and lock the door.

Inside, they start a voodoo ritual designed to release these spirits into the tools, which then lay dormant, until unsuspecting technicians and engineers purchase them.

Note. Halfords, Wilkinson, Aldi and Lidl all have a designated member of staff for their own rituals.

He is usually a sixteen-year-old trainee called Kevin.

 Here are some examples of Auto Electric specific tools that bite back!

The Test Light

A test light has a transparent handle with a bulb inside and a sharp point at one end. A cable coming out of the opposite end of the handle ends in a crocodile clip.

The crocodile clip is attached to a suitable earth bolt and the point is used to contact cables and components to determine if the component or cable is live or not. Can also be used the opposite way round to locate an earth.

There are many ways this tool can assault you. The point is lethal. Its function is to pierce the outer skin of cables to contact the wire inside and also pierce your finger down to the bone.

The clip is not called a crocodile clip for no reason. The little serrated teeth can really make your eyes water.

You can easily spend 30 min’s or so trying to locate a live contact before you find out that the bulb in the handle is blown!

It can also be quite easy to slip, after having located a live contact, and short the rest of the pointed shaft against the vehicle bodywork. The resulting bang and arc welding like sparks, coincide with the rapid upward movement of your head too contact with either the dash or the underneath of the bonnet/ hood.

Exclamations like “ Oh dear, What a silly person I am “ are uttered loudly and repeatedly.

Multi-meters

The Test Light has largely been replaced with the Multi-Meter in today’s complicated, electronically biased vehicles.

The Multi- Meter brings with it a whole new set of circumstances. What can be more impressive than walking out to diagnose a customers vehicle with a Multi-meter the size of a small laptop.

Not so impressive is the way the cooling fan can snag the leads and fling your meter across the workshop.

Some meters are so overly confusing that it makes you wonder if they use one to pick the premium bond numbers when Ernie packs up.

Most meters are Auto Ranging i.e. They alter the read out automatically to suit whatever the meter is being used to measure.

One function is the 10-amp port. Plugging the positive test lead into this port and the negative test lead into the common port allows the user to measure up to 10 amps in a circuit.

Woe betide you if you have miscalculated the current at your test point. The more expensive meters have an internal fuse to protect the meter. The cheaper ones will light up like a fruit machine and then it’s “Good Night Vienna” for the meter.

Another function to be aware of is the tinny and inaudible continuity buzzer that is fitted.

Whilst using this function, it is guaranteed that someone will decide to do a max rev’s check on the nearest engine or your work colleagues will decide to sing along with YMCA on the radio.

Leadlights.

One of the main criteria for successfully diagnosing or repairing faults is the ability to see what you are doing.

Before the advent of today’s rechargeable multi- LED type lamps, the leadlight was the common form of illumination.

Picture the scene. You have limbo’d yourself under the dash to repair a cable etc.

The lead light has been positioned to shed light on what you are repairing.

You reach for your side cutters and BANG. Your face is on fire. The movement has dislodged the leadlight from where it was clipped under the dash.  It has taken you so long to get in the right position that your lead light has reached a temperature only 10 degrees cooler than the surface of the sun.

Your head, being trapped under the dash, has nowhere to go.

Your cheek now has OSRAM cauterised into the skin. The smell reminds of a barbecue that you recently attended.

Finally escaping from under the dash, you check your face in the wing mirror to reveal that you now look like Freddie Krugers less attractive brother.

Loud exclamations of “ Ouch that really smarts” are then heard.

Side cutters

One of the first things to go into a vehicle is the wiring loom. It is secured against the bulkhead and then the dash is build up over it.

A fault has occurred in the wiring loom.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to trace and repair that wiring fault.

Both Snap On and Mac Tools make excellent side cutters, but I use a pair made in Germany. They were forged out of a solid piece of machine steel with cutting edges honed so sharp that they would cut a human hair in half horizontally. A German craftsman fabricates them in a workshop at the top of a tower in Bavaria.

They exist, not to cut through the last cable tie holding the wiring loom against the bulkhead, but to slice through four or five adjacent cables that result in you having to strip out the whole dashboard to repair the damage.

Cries of “ What an unlucky person I am” are heard in the workshop.

Crimping Pliers

The older style terminal-crimping pliers were basically a pair of pliers with cut outs which related to size of the terminals you were attempting to crimp.

The latest types of crimping pliers work on the same principal as the Vice grip. The idea being that your crimps will be consistently tight.

You select the right size terminal for the cable that that you are repairing. The insulation of the cable is stripped, and the bare wire inserted into the terminal.

You select the cut out in the jaws of the pliers against the colour of the terminal and squeeze the handles together until the jaws release themselves.

Sounds easy doesn’t it. Now pinch the skin from the top of your finger in between the top of the jaws as you squeeze.

The pain is excruciating!   Because you have not completed the crimping operation, the jaws are jammed and won’t release.

The release lever is in between the handles and has to be struck smartly to release the jaws.

You can’t see to strike the release lever now because the tears are streaming down your face.

Your cries for assistance are met with hysterical laughter.

See any of the above for the right vocabulary to use.

Inanimate objects also do their best to send you to casualty.

Try kneeling with your full weight onto the cut off square section of a cable tie.

This results in movements not too dissimilar to that lot on Strictly Come Dancing.

Close encounters of the Alternator fan Kind can leave you with black fingernails that a Goth would be proud to have.

So as they used to say in Hill Street Blues “ Lets Be Careful out There “ 

Colin Roaf