When you open the door to your home workshop, you enter a magical realm of order and cleanliness: all the power tools lined up on the shelves. Oils, grease and water clean in the steel cabinet. Screws, nuts, washers, circlips and split pins sorted by size and name in the drawers. And then there are the hand tools: sensibly sorted, sparkling clean and ready to hand in the trolley. Wonderful!
All the worse the visit to the cousin, father-in-law or buddy in the country: In his lightless “workshop”, gardening tools twilight between boxes of broken angle grinders, cookie tins corrode with a mishmash of small parts and in the furthest corner next to the rabbit hutch, the legendary “toolbox” can be found as a central component. This promotional gift from 1998 contains not only rusty water pump pliers made of Indian soft iron, but also ratchets that lock in every direction and a hodgepodge of wrenches in which sizes 10, 13 and 17 are almost certainly missing.
Well, you only need a screwdriver. No, just a screwdriver – nothing more. It should be possible to find one! And is actually found in an old soap box, next to the two lawnmower corpses. After all! It even has a plastic booklet and was produced after Hitler’s death! However, its blade is so chewed off that you can’t even unscrew screws that have been tightened by hand with this thing. Jesus Christ! What to do?
To get such an artifact working again, all you need is a bench grinder. And with this grinding block you can shape the blade AS SHOWN IN THE PICTURES. In an upward direction. And finally, shorten the thing a little and sand the sides to form a straight surface. The perfect blade of a slotted screwdriver is slightly hollow-ground and is only suitable in this form for undoing crummy screws.
Does your brother-in-law / father-in-law / buddy in the country want to have a go and try his luck with the freshly refurbished tool? Take a deep breath and ram the tool into the man’s chest.
In your thoughts. Of course.
