Sunday was a good day. I put up a worktop, which is a proper DIY job that requires all kinds of drilling and cutting and to-me-to-youing. Man's work. For which you need man's tools. Powertools, to be precise - the best kind.
After my first attempt to trim the end of the worktop using a jigsaw resulted in an edge that resembled part of the Nurburgring, I determined that what I needed to get the desired result was in fact a circular saw. Off to homebase I went, and returned with the requisite box of tricks. Now, I've always been a bit of a wuss around rapidly moving sharp objects. I'd call it 'an irrational fear of spinning blades' if I thought that being afraid of fast-moving blades was irrational. To be honest, I think a fear of many-toothed pointy bits of metal - especially motorized ones moving at thousands of RPM - is probably just part of a well developed survival instinct. Still, as the little boy who nearly fainted when being shown round behind the scenes of a supermarket on a cub scout visit when they showed us the bandsaw they used for cutting up joints of meat, it was a little nerveracking for me unpacking the circular saw for the first time. Luckily, the manufacturers had my - and my family's - safety at the forefront of their mind, as shown by the safety warning on the bag containing the spare 7" 24-tooth tungsten carbide-tipped circular saw blade:
(Click for a full sized version)
Reassured that my fears were therefore misdirected, I got on with things. And of course, the saw has every safety feature going (although not this one - scroll down to 'The best dogfooding story ever' for details. Still, since I wasn't sawing in the vicinity of any frankfurters, it probably didn't matter). So long as I'm in charge of the spinning blades I'm generally okay about them - it's just when I see other people waving saws around I get all worriful. So I was chopping up the worktop in no time - and I still have all my fingers. And the worktop fits beautifully into its recess between two brick pillars, thanks to lots of measuring twice and cutting once. Because there's no point in cutting twice, I find. Once cut, generally, things stay cut. Especially with a dirty great circular saw.