Starting Over...What Would You Buy?

[Leon]

"Battleax" wrote in message news: [e-mail]...

Uh, no he should not refrain from replacing his tools. He should consider doing so after looking at what is really important and after getting his home and family back in order. Getting you home and kife and family back to a normal state should be the utmost of your priorities and starting to think about such minor problems as a flooded shop 2 weeks after the storm is an indicator that someone may not have a grasp of the problems that lay before him. I live in Houston and with living in Houston, flooding is not an unusual occourance. Houstton went through a very similar experience as NO back in 2001 and I personally have been in floods 2 or 3 times as far back as 1967. It takes months to even consider moving back into you home if you had only a foot standing in it for any period of time. First there is a shortage of contractors and materials and if you are lucky, claims adjusters to do the work when thousands of homes have been affected. Because there has been this filthy water in you home for possibly weeks and or months a serious case of mold starts to grow in your home. Everything in the house must be thrown out and replaced. Then at a minimum the sheet rock has to be replaced and the insulation must be torn out and replaced. If you are lucky, that is all you have to do. Then consider that all of the neighborhoods near you are doing the same thing in every house. On top of this you still have to go to work every day if the business was not wipped out and hope progress is being made on your home while you are staying at a hotel or an appartment that has no furniture. And how do you get to work, you vehicles flooded long before your house went under. You literally are lucky to have the clothes that are on your back.

Perhaps, to start a thread off with "After watching the still unfolding disaster along the Gulf coast, I can't help but think of all the workshops that were destroyed", All the tools and the effort that was expended to get them in the first place...such a waste. It has taken me decades to find and buy the quality and quantity of tools that I have.

I can assure you that for most flood victims it has also taken decades to obtain the much more important things in life such as his family, home, furniture, etc. For thousands it will again take decades to get back to the same state of well being and accomplishment as they were in 3 weeks ago. How can a person that has "actually" been through this or witnessed this on TV, not see the irony of the statements of the beginning of this thread? At the very least I see the statement as being a bit short sighted and seems to indicate a lack of compassion or understanding of what ANY flood victim will go through when his home has been flooded. "Maybe" 6 months from now a lucky victim can start to think about replacing his shop tools but keeping his family together and feeding them for the next several months should be his immediate concern.

With all that said, I can see the value of this thread but perhaps with a bit more compassion for those that are really in a hard ship right now, save the thread for another 12 months or so.

[Leon]

Snip

Exactly!

[Leon]

Was it not in the Midwest several years ago when the massive flooding took place and whole towns were swallowed up by the rivers that were miles out of their banks.

Insurance for single incidents is great. Insurance in a situation such as NO is of little comfort,

[Leon]

I have been through 4 Major hurricanes plus Houston where I live went through a very similar experience as NO back in 2001 and I personally have been in floods 2 or 3 times as far back as 1967.

[Battleax]

snip

How do you know so much about his particular situation?

[Battleax]

Hmmm...So now winter is considered a natural disaster...

[Battleax]

Lightweight...and irrelevant. I was refering to the original poster's particular situation, not your past experience. Everyone is giving TooMuchTools crap for trying to get his situation in order. Typical newsgroup bashing to make the bashers feel better. Good luck with that.

[Leon]

I do not often respond like this but here goes, YOU are full of crap and apparently have a hard comprehending what you read.

Lightweight MY ASS. ToMuchTools is not having to get any thing in order. He has not mentioned anything about him having a been involved in a flood. He has merely mentioned a possible scenario.

His particular situation does not involve having to do anything.

[Leon]

Right. Explain that to the neighborhoods of families that took more than

12-18 months to get back into their homes. While not all of Houston was totally flooded, I would say that out of a population of 2.5 million and the metro area now being closer to 5 million probably 7-10% of the homes were flooded. Now compare that to the population of NO and I think you will have to agree that was no blip. Houston had water that was easily 16-20 feet deep on a freeway going into down town just from my side of town. Add in the other 6 freeways going into down town.

[bridger]

so back on topic...

I'd get the dust collector before I got the shop vac.

[Dave Hinz]

Make sure you ground it...

[Battleax]

I was under the impression his tools suffered flood damage, this does not appear to be the case. I had him mixed up with a previous poster wondering about his tablesaw and garage full of tools under water. Regardless, Huston was a blip compared to NO.

[Frank Boettcher]

Gentlemen, please settle down and stay civil

I'm that previous poster and I just got back from Biloxi an hour ago. My very special Unisaw is probably toast, however, I still plan to try to recover it. In addition to that I lost about another $2500 in tools that were in the same mini warehouse that I had stored the Unisaw. No insurance.

After spending the weekend dragging my Mother in Law's entire material existence out of her house and to the street, I consider myself lucky. She got seven feet of water and a tree crushed about a third of her house.

Lucky that I did not lose more. Lucky that I came into contact with a number of these little out of town Church groups that are roaming the area helping out. There must be hundreds of them. Eight of them from the first Baptist Church of Gainesville, Fla.spent a full day helping me drag all that slimey stuff to the street in the most intolerable conditions and they never stopped smiling. Lucky to have met the woman from the Parkway Presbyterian Church from Canton Mississippi who stayed up all night cooking so she could feed all comers and she fed me the best meal I may have ever had. Lucky when a group from a church in Macon Missiissippi walked up to me in the middle of the afternoon in the broiling sun and handed me a cold bottle of water. Lucky to have seen some of all the out of state policemen, firemen, nurses, doctors, guardsman, utility workers etc. etc.. making life better by the hour.

Lucky to witness the humor people can retain despite desperate conditions in their lives.

I probably met or saw more minor heroes in 72 hours than most people get to see in a lifetime.

What the media reported was looters and finger pointing about who is to blame for the poor planning and response.

What I saw was people helping out.

Lucky, indeed.

Frank

[AL]

Another example of something I skimped on. I would skip the Jet 1.5HP dust collector and get a giant cyclone. But I wouldn't think twice about spending extra for another Fein Turbo II.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Exactly. And I see nothing wrong with going over a scenario that involves starting over for whatever the reason. Flood, divorce, job loss, fore. burglary, etc. While it is important to get family things in order, at some point tools will be a consideration. The rest of us can help by donating time, money, materials, whatever, to the Katrina victims but we still have to move ahead with our lives. IMO, this is not much more than asking "what do you want for dinner tomorrow?"

[bridger]

after a little thought, I'm gonna qualify my post.

if all I was doing is replacing my shop, the DC would be purchased before the vac. but if the process involved cleaning up after a hurricane, the vac would be one of the very first purchases.

[Bruce Barnett]

And most people never know about them. Bless them all. My best wishes for you too.

It seems so easy to gloss over what happens. But when it happens to you, your whole world turns up side down. My in-laws house was struck by lightening 2 months ago, our whole summer was really disrupted.

My heart goes out to all of those who went through a real disaster. Words cannot begin to describe the hell they go through.

Keep focusing on the good, and forget the jerks.

[Leon]

I think what struck me wrong is that most of the people that have lost everything, those that probably have no insurance most likely did not have the luxury of owning expensive tools. With that in mind, they would probably wish that they had the luxury of worrying about their water soaked tools instead of where their family is and where their next meal may come from. I don't condemn the nature of the thread as much as the timing. I seriously doubt that many NO survivors would have much sympathy for some one that only had to worry about damaged tools at this point. In you only have water soaked tools be thankful.

[Peter Wiley]

I did an interstate move and had to build a new house when I arrived, starting off in a tent with hand tools and a borrowed gen set. So....

Hand tools & hand power tools, minimum of a good 1/2" drill and a cheap

71/2" circ saw. A hand power planer is very useful, I got a Makita which could do rebates over 12mm. I could then make all my own door jambs etc from solid rough sawn stock.

Move up to a sliding compound mitre saw; I have a 12" DeWalt and love it. A table saw is nice too but more for detail work unless you're going to be ripping long lengths of timber. An air compressor and nail gun. Saves time and you can hold something and nail it without needing a 3rd hand.

You've now built the shop/house/whatever. All this stuff can run off a moderately sized gen set.

To get into metal, a good 5" angle grinder and a cheap 4 1/2" angle grinder. Yeah, you can get by with one grinder but it's a PITA to swap from cutting disks to grinding disks 20 times/day to save $20. A stick welder capable of running 1/8" 6011 rods, you can now weld anything you need to weld in steel.

After that it depends on what you're into. Personally, I shipped my Colchester lathe, 30 x 8 H/V mill and big vertical bandsaw first.

Building the house, I used the table saw and a 12" thickness planer quite a lot, but they're second order important for construction carpentry. They came into their own, along with the bandsaw and a router, for fitting the place out.

PDW

[Cherokee-Ltd]

"they are, you know, underprivileged anyway, so this...this is working out very well for them" - Barbara Bush