A Carpenter's Tale

"We were working at this old house. It must have been Elizabethan or Jacobean. Someone told us that Shakespeare stayed there but they probably say that about lots of houses of that age. Anyway it was oak framed and we had to replace a load of sole plates that had rotted on the dwarf walls. They looked OK from the front but they had drawn the moisture from the brickwork and sweated underneath. There is nothing very complicated about replacing them. You just take three courses of bricks out, drill out the pegs that tenons in and drop the old plate. If it isn't too bad you can use it as a template and make up your new one. We would have done this easily but the new oak was almost impossible to drill through. Even though it was green we couldn't touch it. We were burning out drills right left and centre. Then someone had the bright idea of using a double handed plasterer’s whisk. These have a very high torque and low speed. It worked a treat and we soon had the first mortises drilled out. There were loads of them to do and it was a right boring job if you pardon the pun. So we got the young lad on it. He moaned a bit but we told him that if he had been born a hundred years ago he would have been churning them out with a hand auger and a chisel. These kids don't know they are born.

So he had the drill going and he wasn't very heavy. He needed a good feed so to give it a bit of stick he leant on it and just stood there as it bored down. Now the whisk was good, it did the job a treat but it didn't have a clutch so if it snagged it whipped round and you had to be ready for it.

Anyway this lad, James his name was, got fed up with holding the trigger on so he locked it on so he could give his finger a rest. I expect you can guess what happened, the bleeding thing snagged whipped around and the handle caught in his belt. He was on top of it and couldn't stop it turning so it knotted his belt tighter and tighter and the breath was out of him. He couldn't stop it and the only way he could stop it from sending his guts up through his throat was to run around with the drill. He was like a donkey on a treadmill. You would have thought the lead would pull out but it was on an extension lead and there was loads of it on the reel. It kept pulling out and wrapping around his legs. Eventually it pulled out of the socket and the whisk drill stopped with him on top of it held by his belt with his feet and legs wrapped in electric cable. He was lucky it didn't finish him off.

He looked a bit worse for wear so I gave him a half day off. He had a big mark all round his middle where the belt was tightened but other than that there wasn't any lasting damage. He turned out to be a good chippy but I don't think he does any work on oak framed houses anymore".