ShopTalk Sunday: Coax from Heaven and Mower Madness

There are two kinds of shops: the shop you own, and the shop you can actually use.

Come to think of it, there may be three: the shop you own, the shop you can actually use, and the shop you would have if the PowerBall people ever made a clerical error in your favor.

Point is, they are not the same shop.

Most of us who have collected tools for a lifetime already know the problem. We have enough drills, saws, clamps, meters, chargers, screws, glues, fasteners, adapters, bits, blades, washers, widgets, jigs, scraps, parts bins, and “I might need that someday” treasures to open a small hardware annex. Yet when a five-minute repair shows up, the first forty minutes can vanish into the fog.

Where is the 1/4-inch nut driver? Where did the good #00 Phillips bit go? Why is the battery dead? Why are there three tape measures in the shop and not one on the bench where work actually happens?

Real answer: because the good one went back to the “measurement and layout shelf” in a cleaning frenzy some months back. Which proves that over-organization can be just as dangerous as neglect, only with better labels.

And why is the one tube of silicone you need either missing, fossilized, or hiding under a box marked “urgent radio parts” from 2009?

Am I the only one who goes through the glues and mastic department looking for fossils?

Time matters when things break. This is not strictly a tool problem. Maybe it is Mercury Retrograde. Maybe it is rural entropy. Maybe it is just Saturday doing what Saturday does when it sees a man trying to get ahead of the heat.

But this much I assure you: it is mostly a time problem.

Especially when the work window is short. Saturday was supposed to be simple. Get the mowing handled early, clean up the yard enough to silence the guilt circuit, and then settle into a guilt-free ham radio day. This being Field Day weekend, you know the deal: chores first, radio after. Civilization in its finest form.

That was the plan.

Until I was mowing the gun range and saw a piece of coax hanging down from the sky, ending about two feet above the ground.

Now, when a man sees coax dangling from heaven on Field Day weekend, he has a duty to investigate. Being a studious biblical scholar, after a fashion, I quickly checked BibleGateway.com to see whether there is a Psalm, proverb, or lesser-known Book of Antennas in which God leaves RG-58 hanging down from the clouds to ensure all-band dominance of the HF spectrum.

There is not.

Well, shit.

My other suspect was more earthly. Until Saturday morning, I had been a huge fan of the K4TR double-size W5GI Mystery Antenna. It had been attached to an 80-foot pine by way of drone magic, paracord, optimism, and several seasons of East Texas weather. Apparently, after three or four years, the arrangement had decided to file for retirement.

You have to look closely in the picture, just off vertical on the right side, to see it. But the point is the favorite antenna was down. Which meant getting the drone up, lifting a new backhaul line, and hauling more thousand-pound paracord into place.

On Field Day weekend.  Spit fire and save matches.

So I went back to mowing the gun range, because denial is sometimes the most efficient scheduling tool.

That is when the rotary cutter issued forth with a familiar “clunk.” Brush hog, to rural folks. Locked.

This one required a little deft driving but there it was:

Now we had a morning.

There is no such thing as a ten-minute antenna problem. There are also not many ten-minute three-point cutter problems, especially when a missing top bolt or an opinionated rock has entered negotiations. The good news was that the flat tire I inflicted on the riding mower might actually be a ten-minute problem.

Maybe. I should be able to lift the back end with the chain hoist, pop the tire off, and then prevail on my neighbor, who runs a tire shop, to take it in and fix it this week. There may be silver involved. Rural economics still has a pleasing medieval layer when done right.

And here is where the shop lesson begins, though not in the way the organization books would have it.

The point is not to have a perfect shop. Perfect shops are for people who do not appear to be doing very much in them. The point is to have a shop that lets you begin.

Not finish. Begin. Can I get to the drone gear without a half-hour treasure hunt? I can see it on the shelf from here – so less than 20 seconds, tops.

Can I get to the chain hoist? One minute to rig – easy.

Can I find the air chuck? Can I lift the mower? Can I get the meter, the coax adapters, the right wrench, the tire tools, or the tractor pin before the morning becomes one long exercise in muttering or the East Texas Daily Sweat Lodge Encounter? That is the real shop test. (Well, and the power bill that comes with cooling.)

A useful shop is not a room full of tools. It is a place where the next move is obvious.

That sounds simple until the day the antenna falls out of the sky, the brush hog locks up on a rock, the mower tire goes soft, and the sun is already making threats and smoldering.

A lot of people think the secret to a better shop is owning better tools. Sometimes, sure. A good saw beats a bad saw. A good meter beats guessing. A chain hoist can make a job possible that would otherwise be a chiropractor’s boat payment.

But most of the time, the expensive tool is not the missing piece. The missing piece is access. The time loss is not always in doing the work. It is in finding the thing that lets the work start.

Finding the Battery

Shove ’em all into low income housing…

Finding the charger. (Bottom left in my battery slum.)  And it bears repeating: My power tool stack is always on 10-second call.

Finding the fastener. Finding the pencil. Finding the work surface. Finding the small part you set down eight seconds ago. Finding the adapter that converts “almost fits” into “done.” Finding the one tool you know you own because you bought it twice.

The work may be ten minutes. The finding may be forty.

This is why the “Ten-Minute Shop” idea matters. Not because every job takes ten minutes. That would be fantasy, cable television, or a man lying to himself in new work gloves. The Ten-Minute Shop is the shop where most common jobs can be started in ten minutes.  Not because you solved the whole problem. Because you stopped paying the tax of delay. You see the problem, know where the tools are, and now it’s down to delay of game between your ears.

That is enough, most times. If you can start quickly, momentum has a chance. If you cannot start, the whole thing becomes a fog bank.

This does not require reorganizing the whole shop. In fact, reorganizing the whole shop is how many shops become worse. You tear everything apart, make twenty piles, run out of daylight, and spend the next three months living inside the explosion. The better approach is more modest. Beat down the paths you actually walk.

In my case, there are certain paths that matter because they come up over and over. Electrical and radio. Cabling and fabbing. Mower and tractor. Greenhouse. House repairs. Solar and battery foolery. Each of those has its own little gravity well.

This is why I do not worry much about owning duplicate screwdrivers. A screwdriver at the electronics bench, a screwdriver with the mower tools, and a screwdriver in the house kit is not waste. It is time compression. The enemy is not duplicate tools. The enemy is duplicate searching. Hardware stores organize by species: wrenches here, drill bits there, glues over there, fasteners down the aisle. That makes sense for selling. It does not always make sense for doing.

Doing is Job-Based

A radio job wants solder, wick, flux, small cutters, magnification, DVM, coax adapters, clip leads, dummy load, and a notebook. A mower job wants sockets, oil, filters, plug wrench, funnels, rags, grease gun, tire gauge, and air. A greenhouse job wants timers, fittings, tubing, labels, spare emitters, and enough tape to suggest adult supervision may be absent.

The shop gets faster when the tools live near the jobs they serve. That is not organization in the magazine sense. That is memory stored in wood, hooks, shelves, bins, and scars.

Same with the bench. I have heard rumors of people who keep a neat bench all day. I do not understand these people, but I respect the legend they’re pimping..

A bench is supposed to have a clear place where the problem lands. The thing needing repair. The meter. The fastener. The mysterious part. The cup of coffee that is absolutely not supposed to be sitting near the electronics but somehow is.

I have put down blue tape and made “keep clear” zones and given myself stern management lectures. They work for a while, then I violate my own treaty. Still, the principle is sound. A clear bench is not neatness. It is stored momentum.

Same with the dumb stuff: pencils, tape measures, safety glasses, rags, flashlights, driver bits, chuck keys, air chucks, zip ties, Sharpies. The humble things stop more jobs than the exotic things. No man wants to admit he lost twenty minutes because he could not find a pencil, but the shop gods see all.

And batteries. Cordless tools are wonderful until the batteries become a shell game. Charged should mean charged. Dead should mean dead. Questionable batteries should be tested, not emotionally negotiated with. There is no virtue in keeping a battery that ruins work sessions.

The project problem is different.

The clean-shop people will tell you to put unfinished projects in a tray or tote. They are not wrong, but they are only half right. The better answer is to finish when you can. Sign in to the job. Stay with it until the thing is done, done, and done.

Firefighters do not go back to the firehouse while the fire is still burning. Good software people know the deliverable is what counts. My friend Sim built a fine printed-circuit assembly business up in the silicon forest by working until the work was done, sleeping on the shop floor when required, and then getting back to it. That kind of stubbornness is how some people end up owning the building. Now many buildings, in fact…

But life interrupts. Glue dries. Paint cures. Parts are ordered. Weather rolls in. The phone rings. Someone needs help. The universe notices you are making progress and sends a tractor problem.

So yes, have a project corral. A tray, shelf, tote, or assigned footprint where the unfinished job keeps its parts, screws, notes, and special tools. Not as permission to quit, but as a way to restart without rediscovering your own thinking.

Before walking away, write the next move if you have to. “Test power supply under load.” “Buy 1/2-inch hose barb and two clamps.” “Check continuity between center pin and shield.” (Seriously this is a 10-second deal and you’d never write down hopeless minutiae like this. Stop at BIG stopping points:  “Resume when Lowe’s delivery drops off 200 more pavers…”)

That is all the Ten-Minute Shop really is. A trail back into the work.

Saturday’s trail was pretty clear. Drone gear for the antenna. Chain hoist for the mower. Air hose just long enough to reach the right place. Tire tools close enough. Radio test gear where radio test gear belongs. The big green mechanic’s roll-around for the heavy stuff. Enough of the repeated paths beaten down that the day did not have to become a full archaeological dig.

Was the shop perfect? Don’t be ridiculous. But I could begin. And beginning is where most repairs are won.

The real payoff is not neatness. The payoff is Total Time on Task. I just finished Timenamics: The Hidden Currency, and one of the useful ideas in it is that people waste enormous pieces of life in small frictions. Searching. Restarting. Re-deciding. Relearning what they were doing yesterday.

The shop is where that theory either becomes useful or gets laughed out of the building. A good shop does not make work disappear. It makes work reachable. It shortens the distance between “well, hell” and “hand me the wrench.”

So if you want the practical takeaway, there it is: do not clean the whole shop. Do not buy your way out. Do not build a shrine to pegboard perfection. Pick one recurring problem and make it easier to start. Star of today’s problems here? The Chain Hoist on a 2 by 12 on 12 foot centers. Kept oiled, ready to rock and under a minute to rig.  I believe I could lift Dallas with it. The chain hoist has paid for itself in time-savings many times over.

Mower tire. Antenna repair. House electrical. Greenhouse plumbing. Tractor nonsense. Radio bench work. Whatever actually happens around your place. Put the first tools where the first move happens. Look for the “secret lever” which at my age is “get the problem to a reasonable working height first…”

That alone will improve your shop more than most grand reorganization schemes. And if, on Field Day weekend, a piece of coax comes dangling down from the heavens like a divine hint that your antenna system has joined the choir invisible, you will at least know where the meter is.

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net