Jeffrey Loftus -
This is a tale of making without blueprints and loving every moment of it.
Last summer I built a fence in our backyard, but the soil was so rocky, I had to use a jackhammer to "drill" the holes for the posts. Unfortunately, my extension cord was not long enough for the jackhammer to dig all the holes, so, for the last 4 posts, I used metal stakes that go 3' into the ground and have a 6" holder for the fence post to sit in - I know, I know... should have just got a longer extension cord, but I had to learn that the hard way.
A few weeks ago, a tornado decided to come through Lynchburg, and along with it - lots of wind. Well, you guessed it, that wind took out those last four posts in the fence. The trusty (not trusty) metal stake snapped in half right where the stake was welded to the post holder. I didn't want to go and rent another jackhammer + my spine was fractured - that is another story - so I resorted to buying metal fence posts to hammer into the ground on both sides of the fence posts.
I took a trip to Home Depot and put eight 5' metal fence posts into my cart and then went over to look at the fence post drivers - you know, the metal cylinder thing with handles on the sides to hammer the stakes into the ground easily - $60. WHAT?! $60?? I thought, "I don't need that, I'll just hit everything in with a mallet - HA. When I got home and started my project, my mallet wouldn't drive the post an inch into the ground. Now, I could have driven back to HD and bought that post driver, but at that moment, I was called back to the wise words of one of the greatest TV characters of all time - Ron Swanson. In an episode of Parks and Rec, He made Andy and April's wedding rings out of a wall sconce (and says, "People who buy stuff are suckers." - I was not about to be a sucker! (Check out this 22 second video for the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V64BDBfsIK4)
I thought, "As a student, I pay $40 for a membership to Vector Space. I could buy this post driver [and be a sucker] OR - I could go to Vector Space and BUILD IT MYSELF. So that's exactly what I did. All of the projects I have done, from building furniture to renovating my house have been so planned out and sequenced, but I didn't want to do that on this project - I didn't want to measure a single thing. I got in my car, drove to Vector, scanned my card, went to the welding space, looked through the plethora of scrap metal pieces and proceeded to grind and cut and weld my post driver. I didn't measure all but once piece so that I could cut it exactly in half (after which I thought, "I really didn't need to do that") It took my 20 minutes to build.
It was not pretty. It was not perfect. It was crude and the welds would make Doc wince, but it was everything it needed to be. I got home and checked my watch - the whole adventure took only 45 minutes. I walked into the backyard and *TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP* - 5 taps with my "vectormade" post driver and the post was in the ground. I was so ecstatic, I called my wife outside, showed her with the next post and did it in just three taps - I then proceeded to do the happy-dance-punch-the-air-and-make-primitive-man-noises celebration.
So, I learned that every once and a while, you need make things out of scrap pieces with no drawings or sketches beforehand... and you don't always have to buy that $60 tool from Home Depot, sometimes... yes sometimes, you can head over to your local makerspace and make something that might not look as shiny, but will do a better job.
So get out there! Make... and don't plan too much.
