So I’m writing a response to Neil aka CAG about sharpening nail sets.
Got to thinking how so many people waste time/money doing dopey things.
Wheres your list?
I had this guy that worked for me insist on scraping the old caulking and PL Premium and whatever else was on my caulk guns off. He must have spent 20 minutes on each one before I caught him doing that. A friggin new gun is under ten bucks and who cares if there’s caulk on them.
Had another guy tape down red rosin paper all over my newly finished wood floors in a huge room. Thank god I caught him. He started using duct tape… OMG!
Told him that first of all the duct tape would rip the finish off and secondly right behind him was a pile of new drop cloths.DUHHHH
I left the paper down that he later taped with blue painters tape which aint cheap either. The paper was ripped up in less than two days and I fired him the same day he went and taped it down anyway after I told him not to. He must have spent a solid half hour doing it.
Be well aware
andyc
The secret of Zen in two words is, “Not always so”!
When we meet, we say, Namaste’..it means..
- I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides,
- I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace.
- I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you
- and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.
Replies
Shapening nail sets? That's a good one I must have missed that thread. I have recondition a nail set or two by machining that tiny dimple back into the tip that helps keep them from skipping but sharpened? What's that about.
I've got no real complaints with my troops that I can think of off the top of my head but I can speak for myself. I like to rescue hardened paintbrushes. I like treating what appear to be ruined brushes with Imperial Rapid Brush Cleaner and then combing and brushing them clean right up to the ferrule. I'll then recondition natural bristle brushes with DL Hand cleaner until they are fully restored. While they are really scenic painting brushes I have some brushes from back in my college days (25 yrs.) and have some house painting brushes that must be at least 15 years old. Yeah I could certainly save time by just buying new ones but I get a lot of thinking and planning done while I'm working on the brushes so I think it a worthwhile activity.
As for protecting new floors while duct tape and rosin paper are definite no no's I'm sorry but I think drop cloths aren't necessarily the best idea either. We use a special floor protection paper by FortiFiber called Seekure. Seekure doesn't rip since it has a fiber reinforcing running through it and while it's water resistant it still allows the floor underneath to breathe. It cost a few bucks but is well worth the protection it provides and on occasion we have removed it and saved it to use again since its so tough. And as long as were talking about spending a few ¢ when you're protecting finished work it's no time to get cheap and not use blue tape or another easy release tape.
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To be fair to the guy who posted about nail sets, he too was putting the little dimple back and I thought his suggestion made sense, though I have never used a nail set long enough to wear out that dimple. I suppose we each have our little quirks that seem wasteful to others, but seem perfectly logical to us. I tend to pick up all the unused screws and nails that end up on the floor of the job site, but then just throw them whererever, so it's unlikely I'll find them again, and will be unlikely to find the right size I need at the time I need it.
Then there's my dad who will spend hours scraping rust off of something or re-packing an old valve when I find it easier to just buy a new one.
Guy I worked for when I worked at a landscape nursery said when he worked for a builder, the boss made them pick up every nail they dropped, even if they were on a ladder. That would make for slow progress!
When I was stripping concrete foundation forms once I was letting the boards drop into the hole and would pick them up later. The builder got on my case and made me throw them onto the edge of the hole. Later my immediate supervisor criticized me for doing that--told me to just drop them in the hole and get them later! When I told him that's what I'd been doing until the builder told me to do what I was doing, the boss said, "The builder left; do it the way I told you!"
Actually Danno I just a few minutes ago discovered and read through that thread ($10 nail set sharpener) and I think his suggestion makes tons of sense and there are a bunch of folks there that aren't seeing the benefit in what he saying.
I was on a project a few years ago where I had a blunt nail set that was skipping off the tiny nails I was trying to drive. It just so happens that a dremel with a variety of bits is a tool set I am almost never without so I took out the dremel and fixed the nail set.
Now I could very well have gotten into my truck and driven to a hardware store to get a new nail set but when your billing at $85 per hour plus that $5 nail set when you figure the trip into the cost then in reality costs $90 to $100.
Reading Idaho Dons suggestion I think that show some real resourceful thinking that I'm not sure I would have ever thought of or considered had I not had my dremel with me but that hint now becomes part of my own personal knowledge base.
I've got to wonder now if you were paying Jerrald Hayes to set embossed trim with a minimum of damage would you want him to
Continue to work with the dull nail set skipping off and enlarging holes creating more putty work down the road
Drive to a hardware store to get another nail set for $5 (that really costs you a lot more) or
Fix the nail set on site?
I had a guy (who no longer works for me) run out of finish nails for the pneumatic gun one afternoon and he mad the trip to a nearby Home depot to get more never thinking once about:
what else he could work on that didn't need that size nail (he could then call in that he needed those nails and they would have been there in the morning)
what else he could get in that trip that we needed so that the trip would be at least worth the time.
He never got the picture what those nails really cost. Reading Idaho Dons suggestion ex post facto I now think it was a great one.
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Edited 8/21/2005 8:36 pm ET by JerraldHayes
You only carry one nail set around??????The secret of Zen in two words is, "Not always so"!
When we meet, we say, Namaste'..it means..
I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides,
I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace.
I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you
and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.
In my primary box I carry three but three different sizes. If you need a fine point nail set a big coarse one just wont do and vice versa. And actually I do have multiple sets but they are in other tool boxes that I don't necessarily have with me.
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The guy I work for sent me across town to Lowes to buy one four foot long board. Before I left, I thought of asking if there was anything else he might need, but figured, he's an adult, and he's my boss, so...I left. When I walked in with the board, he says, "As soon as you left I remembered I need joint compound, an electric box, and screws." We ended up taking an early lunch and drove back across town.
My favorite time with him was following him to lunch, all the time wondering why I couldn't just ride in his truck, then following him to Lowes, then out to his shop in a nearby city, then back to the jobsite. I guess he was concerned we wouldn't get back to the jobsite by quitting time if I had left my car there. (Maybe it's the burritos I had for lunch or that I hadn't showered in three days?) (Just kidding!)
The guy working for me on a siding/trim job drove me nuts. He had a four pack pouch that he would only put one type nail in. So, we went from framing to plywood, he had to go over to the truck and empty his pouch, to put in 6d instead of 10. 20 minutes later, we are nailing trim, he needs to empty, to go to 8d galvanized, again, when we start putting up the 1" poly insulation.
Just to make sure he loosened up any marbles I had left, he must have cleaned his hands 30 times a day. We used Phenoseal in the caulk gun. I always cut the tip small. He recut it so there was a hole the size of a clothes pole, then he constantly had to use his finger to smear sh!t all over, then got down and spent 10 minutes washing his hands.
A buddy of mine used him to do roofing for a few days, came back to me and said, "Does he wash his hands enough or what?"
The good thing was that the job got done (as much as possible). He didn't walk away from anything. Whether he had to climb to the rake and cut nails off that came through the roof or lay on his back to put plywood upside down, he did it. There were times I would have walked away and come back to it, he just kept going.
He's a temperamental sob too, but that is another thread.
Don
> "As soon as you left I remembered I need ....
Another thing he needs is a cell phone. While you're on the road to the store, he can make up a list. Call him and get it when you get there. Then from the store you can call back to the job site with those "They're out of X, can we use Y" type questions.
As for cleaning caulking guns, not a bad idea if you do it immediately before the glop gets hard. You don't have to get it perfectly clean, just good enough to handle without transferring the mess to your hands and other things.
-- J.S.
Just like you do, I watch the weather channel and rub out the easy one. LOL
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
let's be entrophatic, you start
If you ask my wife she would say, "he waste all his time on that breaktime stuff" I do not agree with that statement. I learn tons here. To me the real time waster is the fact that I am too organized. I can tell you where everthing is in the tool baxes and the trailer, I can tell you this because I clean it almost every weekend.An inch to short. That's the story of my life !
bstcrpntr --- I hope to grow into this name.
"I can tell you where everthing is in the tool boxes and the trailer"
I'm just the opposite. I always seem to forget where I put everything.
As far as Breaktime, I don't get to spend a lot of time here. Just depends on the workload.
Re: "I had this guy that worked for me insist on scraping the old caulking and PL Premium and whatever else was on my caulk guns off."
Taking care of tools is as much an attitude as it is a method. While laboriously scraping hardened gunk off of tools may not be the most cost effective use of time the desire to keep the tool in good condition is laudable.
Tools that appear to need attention, even if the attention is not cost effective, set up appearances that might lead a less knowledgeable helper to think you don't care for your tools.
I have seen one painter who buys high quality caulk guns and then soaks them in previously well used mineral spirits. This softens the gunk and makes a lot of it come off with a quick scrub with a stiff brush and a wipe. Same treatment the rest of his gear gets after soaking overnight. His guns look brand new. Although most of their original paint has come off the metal parts.
20 min to clean guns I paid $8 for x 3= $24 an hour. I pay him $15 an hour not to mention I have gazillions of things going on that REALLY need attention to get this gig done.And speaking of wasting time...I ask him to grab me some 2x4's when I was framing a closet. He walks down the stairs a step a minute ....comes back up the stairs (a step a minute). Every step he took that I heard...well, I wanted to strangle him. Then he walks in the room and hands me two studs....Grrrrrrrr.
It reminded me of "listening" to a guy that worked for me less than a week about a year ago...I could hear him in the next room using my Bosch to rip a half dozen strips of plywood. The saw would start...then stop a few seconds later.again and again like that. Too irritating for words.He did everything like that.
Be slower'n a slug
a...
The secret of Zen in two words is, "Not always so"!
When we meet, we say, Namaste'..it means..
I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides,
I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace.
I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you
and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.
for the record it was not me who suggest sharpening the nail sets....
Andy - I posted a little further down with one of my pet peeves. I don't know if you are in the mood for a guy like this - a couple annoying habits, but a mechanic that can do decent work. I think he was supposed to get a big job that may have fallen through and he may be looking for work. He's not cheap. IIRC, you are in the Huntington area. He's from Islip Terrace. If you are interested, send me an e-mail and I'll give you his number.
Don (formerly Hammerlaw)