There are times when tools from the shop shouldn’t be brought into service in the house. You know, like using a circ saw on a frozen side of beef, or perhaps trigger-clamping the mixer to a table and letting it rip.

In this case that’s exactly what happened. Officially this is a horrible idea. However, with just a few changes in the setup like mounting the entire rig to make it a bit more stable and using a strap clamp instead of a trigger clamp, I could see how it would work.

See Honey? You Don’t Need A Stand Mixer [There, I Fixed It]

Sort of a cross between “There, I Fixed It“, Cheap-Ass Tools, and Doh! comes an ASHI Reporter’s Postcards from the Field monthly feature. It documents a variety of funny — and weird and disturbing — home inspectors’ finds.

This kind of stuff will murder you in an inspection. There are about a hundred different ways to get creative with outlets and power but if an inspector is coming anywhere near your job site, don’t let them find this.

Inlet? [Source]

From the way they wrecked out one side of this building it looks like they meant for it to happen. I can’t imagine why, but you’d figure any demo crew could look at this and see it wasn’t going to fall straight down.

Then again, I’ve never seen an entire building roll upside down either, so there’s a first for everything. I’m not a demolition expert but I can’t see how this helped them in the long run if it was indeed on purpose. At least the folks across the street in the building next to it had a nice view of the action.

Thanks to reader Karen for the heads up on this video.

Demolition in Turkey Goes Wrong [Youtube]

We can’t really say we’ve been here exactly, because we haven’t, but we do understand the busted-ass-car-have-no-money syndrome. It’s a crippling disease that strikes us all at one time or another. In this example we have what used to be a nice car, now ravaged with duct tape and a few flashlights.

With a little bailing wire and a few pieces of gum, this aftermarket install would be a perfect candidate for Mad Mike to do some of that electronic pimping he’s famous for. It’s a horrible waste of a good Mag-Lite too.

Note* Props to Joel for sending us to There, I Fixed It.

MacGyver Headlight [There, I Fixed it]

YouTube user MasterGrayFox02 good-naturedly posted this video of himself trying to figure out how to use a small excavator to load dirt into a truck. No injuries here, just a mistake that’ll require a little cleanup. As MasterGrayFox02 put it, it’s “how to tell there is a new guy working on the machines.”

Construction Accident [YouTube]

Okay, so we’re not condoning laughing at someone else’s injuries. But in this case, it’s too, um, educational not to watch. This video shows a guy, presumably in England, who decides a good place to light up is right on top of a Shell fuel truck. Ahh, Darwin. Is there anything you can’t prove?

Shell Garage [YouTube]

This is what happens when enough wind hits a vertical plane.  We imagine the guy driving the truck must’ve been chewing on his stomach about halfway through the video.  Looks to us like the trailer was empty, which didn’t help — effectively he had a sail on the back of his rig.

Whatever the situation, we feel bad for the driver, even if they weren’t hurt.  Of course, as some of the commenters on the site were saying, a driver should know his truck and recognize when conditions are too dangerous to drive.  We wonder why the driver risked it.

Truck Blown Away [YouTube]

This is a prime example of why you need to pay attention when cutting anything that might be holding something up.  Use your head in the manner not seen in this video –- think.

This video might’ve been a staged thing, but I’ve seen it happen where it wasn’t, and more than a little wood and debris fell on the unhappy worker underneath.  Most remodelers don’t wear hard hats, but when doing demo, even if you know what’s going on, you might want to consider it.  This guy is just lucky there were no nails sticking out of that board that hit him.

Dangerous Woodwork [YouTube]

Talk about Doh!  I look back fondly on December of ’08.  I look back on it fondly because it was the last time my shop was functional. It’s my own fault. Seriously, take a look at this picture and tell me this is the shop of someone on the ball. This, quite frankly, is what happens when you become the dumping ground for other people’s crap or projects — the junk seems to swell beyond capacity and beyond any semblance of control. That program ended two days ago.

I snapped this picture about an hour into working the mess down, and I posted it on the blog to serve as a warning to others.  Especially if you have a shop at work and the home shop is not your primary, beware! Don’t end up like me, two weeks behind any project you’d like to start, simply for the fact that you can’t get to your tools.

I’ve already begun several projects, like a new miter bench and a few homemade wood racks, as well as a bit of store-bought storage for some of the new gear I’ve managed to steal from my old man. I’ve also started the crap-removal process which has already filled two trash cans.  It’s shameful, I know, but over the next few days I’m getting the home shop down to fighting weight if it kills me –- or anyone else in the way for that matter.

A year or two ago we posted a guy swinging on a crane arm. Now this other guy has apparently taken up the challenge and is vying for the bonehead crane-swinging crown.

He exhibits great style in his routine, however he fails to realize this isn’t going to end well should his head ever hit the arm, or should the guy inside fling him off at whatever trajectory he happens to be launched on –- and I do mean launched — at the moment of disconnect.

Looks like fun, and probably is the first time or two, but at some point someone isn’t going to be able to hang on, and the resulting mess will require a meat wagon.

When Workers Get Bored [YouTube]

I don’t care what commercial or spoof this is, it speaks about something true enough in the real world:  If you leave enough jackasses around the shop with gear on hand, they’ll come up with something like this.

The golf-style commentary really makes it funny, but the whole thing reminds me of high-school shop class — you know, when the one or two smart guys were learning skills that would forward them in life while the rest of the class were figuring out how far the table saw could launch a board across the shop.

Guess which group I fell in.

When Workers Get Bored [YouTube]

Here you see an interesting game of chicken, but it’s not the same version you might be familiar with.  Sure, other cars and road traffic might find this activity a bit unnerving, but it’s the cop, who could any minute catch a glimpse of it, that you’re really playing chicken with.

Not only have we done this sort of maneuver ourselves, it worked so well the first time that we tried it a few times after that. For the record, the third time we got caught — and with the fine added into the cost of the project, we still came out ahead of having it done by contractors.

To my knowledge that sprinkler system is still in place and functional today.

The awesome photo was provided by photo pool member resq47.

Toolmonger Photo Pool [Flickr]

I realize that we’ve covered tools designed specifically to melt ice with propane, but this strikes me as one of those cases where one must apply one’s (not so) common sense. While propane may work wonders for melting ice in the middle of a concrete driveway, applying the same tool to a porch might lead to, um, disastrous results.

In this case WBZ channel 38 reports that a guy in New Bedford, CT was clearing ice from his porch with a torch connected to a 20-pound propane cylinder when he managed to light his home’s vinyl siding on fire. “The fire quickly spread into the building’s uninsulated exterior wall and then into the second and third-floor apartments,” WBZ reports. They go on to indicate that it took the efforts of 25 firefighters to put out the blaze.

This is something that always scared me when I lived in an apartment — that one of the other residents would do something like this.

(Thanks, 416style, for the totally unrelated CC-licensed photo.)

Man Burns Home Melting Ice With Blowtorch [WBZ 38]

The best stories always seem to happen when no one’s around.  They pass from person to person, and eventually a habitual skeptic, who can’t believe something if he hasn’t seen it for himself, will say the event is an urban myth — that is, unless it was captured on video, like this fiasco at Target.

We feel for them, but the sheer laugh-factor has got to be worth the time it took to get those carts pushed around to the loading dock and back into the truck — if anyone could push carts, laughing that hard.

How Not To Unload Hundreds Of Shopping Carts [YouTube]

I love it when signs save me money and make me feel smart.  Of course, everyone’s had spell check do a number on their work — we’ve had a couple funny ones here at Toolmonger — but it’s amusing to see it happen to other folks, too.

Most people won’t read anything past “50 percent off” anyway, so “register” being misspelled way at the bottom will hardly be a stumbling block amid the pillaging going on at the table it’s attached to.  I had two tools in my hand before I stopped to read the sign fully myself.

Lowe’s [Website]

Watching other folks screw up a lifting operation never gets old — but it always makes you wonder about the circumstances at the scene when they were rigging it up.  Did the crane operator have somewhere else to be? Did he bet his buddy he could screw this bad boy up in under twenty seconds?

It just doesn’t occur to people that what you may think is a permanent connection or solid object is only strong in one direction.  Lifting on an object with four times its own weight slung under it isn’t the best plan of action.  We suspect they came to that conclusion at about second 13 of the video.

Vrachtwagen Valt [YouTube]