owlrigh

An angle grinder is a very useful tool, with which you can do cut, grind, remove paint, smooth corners, and I'm sure there are other uses I am as yet unfamiliar. What sticks in my head is that it will hurt, maim, and perhaps kill you without a moment's notice. And yet I have to use one just about every day.

"The angle grinder's the most dangerous tool you can use," tells me just about every bloke in the boat yard. "The four-inch," for they all name them by inch size, despite Australia being metric," is the least, and the nine-inch, that's a man-killer."

I've mostly been using the five-inch.

It all started when I went to the big old timber fishing boat and began work there. I'd to strip back the old filler and caulking in the seams between the wooden planks, which took me better part of a couple of weeks and I've still not finished. Everywhere there's old copper stuff I've to remove -- and to do so I've to use the cutting blade and cut through copper rivets, bolts, pipes, through-hull fittings, and on. The cutting blade, it occurs to me as I slice through metal with the ease of butter and a hot knife, would be an excellent tool to chip and fly off, lodge in my throat, and I'd lie in a pool of bloody mud until my dad called me over for smoko. ("Smoko" being Australian for short tea breaks, wherein one smokes a cigarette if one so desires.)

When my dad was getting the grinder to give to me, Ben found out and began handing out suggestions. "Put the grip back on it. Get the safety goggles. Some gloves."

They use none of these things, taking off safety features of the grinder like the cover to stop blades flying off at your face and the grip, which gives you a steadier old on the machine. While they find the safety features a hindrance, I was all for having them back on, and wear goggles, gloves, long sleeves, and hair covering religiously. My dad had been giving me stories just the day before.

"When I was working down in Brisbane," he said, "there was this guy who'd been cut by an angle grinder.

"He was arguing with his neighbour, and went home. The neighbour went to his shed and came back out with his nine-inch angle grinder, with a long extension cord, and came at his head like so," making a threatening movement, "and the guy put up his hand to protect his face. Chopped off all his fingers."

Ben and I looked at each other queasily.

"He called the cops, but the guy went back inside and changed the extension lead to a small one and said he couldn't have gone outside, that the guy'd come to his home and he'd just been protecting himself.

"When he came out of hospital the guy had sold his house and moved away. His fingers, though ... cut up by an angle grinder. They were all twisted and he couldn't do much with them."

To hold an angle grinder, your hands have to be awfully close to the spinning blade.

"When your dad got the angle grinder back from Bunnings they'd left it switched on," said Ben, Bunnings being a large chain hardware store, where he'd sent it to get fixed. "When we plugged it in, it spun around on the tabletop. Luckily your dad was right by the plug and took it out right away."

From then on I carefully placed the angle grinder on the ground a fair distance from me, plugged it in carefully and made ready to pull power if it began spinning all on its own. Another yachtie was helpful with his story.

"I was working on a trawler and someone had left it switched on but pulled the power cord. I had the grinder by my foot, a four-inch, and when I plugged it in it ran up my foot and up my leg, getting tangled in my trousers right here," a movement below his groin, "and the motor burned out."

"You're real helpful in making me not scared of angle grinders," I told him.


When cutting the copper bits of it would hit me all the time, and it was only after having done it for days that I was aware that my dad had a full-head mask with big clear face-front on it. He used it when I entreated him to finish off cutting the copper coolant pipes underneath the timber boat for me.

I'd been trying for a couple of hours. I'd manage for 30 seconds before I'd put the grinder down, do something else for five minutes, and then do it all over again. It would have taken me all day to cut a few copper pipes which took him fifteen minutes. He did so with sparks, smoking heated metal, and chips flying off to hit me standing three metres away.

I am the wussiest boatbuilder's assistant that there ever was. Nobody, however, made fun of my shamed admission I was too frightened to use the machine and could someone else come and do the protracted work for me. Pulling oakum caulking is easier, as is sanding, cutting out rotten timber, wielding a lump hammer all day.

From tomorrow, however, it will be a solid week of using an angle grinder -- lots of paint on that wooden boat to come off, and it will all be done by me.