A Tool of the Establishment - column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Tool of the Establishment

Stopping for bright, shiny things lying on the road is seldom a good idea, but since there was no other traffic on a rural road the other morning I stopped to pick up a bright, shiny thing.

Said bright, shiny thing is a spark plug wrench with a handle welded at a right angle. The handle can also be used as a flat-blade screw driver or a pry. The handle is stamped with “STIHL” and a sequence of numbers, so presumably this is a tool which came with one of Stihl’s highly-valued chainsaws.

Most such small-engine spark plug wrenches are double-ended, offering two sizes so that the tool can be packaged with different models. The pronounced asymmetry of this one suggests that the owner hacksawed off the other end, presumably to help manipulate the needed spark plug socket in an awkward space. Your mechanic could tell you many narratives about how the engineers who design gasoline engines sometimes seem determined that spark plugs be placed in almost inaccessible locations.

This wrench is a nice thing someone has lost off a trailer or a pickup, and I hope I can return it to the owner.

Hand tools are in themselves good, honest things, but are now mostly cobbled together out of pot metal in Shanghai, which is why hitting the yard sales for American, German, or Finnish tools is useful. Even if you don’t need another screwdriver, wrench, socket, or chisel right now, you will eventually, and you might as well pick up good used hand tools now instead of paying more for crumbly junk later.

Besides, you might run across some of the good stuff stolen from my garage by those among us whose concept of ownership of the means of production is more from Marx-Lenin-Stalin than from Jesus.

In an aside we may note that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin often spoke of the nobility of the working man, though like many of our modern leaders they seem never to have busted a sweat themselves except on the tennis court or the golf course. (Our state representative, James White, and our federal representative, Brian Babin, are intimately familiar with stringing barbed wire, shoveling ****, pushing a broom, and working the night shift to get through school. That is part of why they are work-boots-on-ground effective. I imagine many of their colleagues just don’t get it.)

There is no app for a properly balanced hammer, for the hammer is the app. It is not programmed, nor can it be recharged. A good steel file responds to the craftsman’s hands, not to a code. A wrench, once purchased, serves the careful owner for the rest of his life, and is not subject to a densely-worded and deceptive contract. Your grandpa’s pocket knife has lasted three generations without losing a satellite signal.

I will never be a good comrade, because I know that books (I’m speaking of Keats, Wordsworth, Lewis, Chesterton, Viktor Frankl et al, not Barbara Cartland [shudder]) are as essential to civilization as hunting, fishing, and good, honest work. This nation needs men and women in “all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war” (John Milton), men and women who know their way around Paradise Lost, the pea patch, iambic pentameter, and a good socket set.

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