Today, I was inhabited for a while by my partner's grandfather's ghost.
My partner and I are technomads. We travel a lot. Often for months at a time. I've got some posts on driving across the country in this blog. See Driving. It can be inspirational. Sometimes it's a lot of highway.
When we're not traveling, we settle in one of two places. We own a boat, currently on the Gulf Coast of Florida (and yes Hurricane Ian beat it up.) Or, we live in my partner's grand-parents' old house in North Carolina. The grandparents have passed on from this world, but her auntie has been living there for 37 years. We have a bedroom, and share the kitchen and the garage.
We also share the house with the ghosts of my partner's grandparents, Al and Olive. They're largely benign and -- frankly -- cheerful spirits.
In addition to their spirits, we have relics. Al's old table saw dated from at least 1953. It might have been even older than that.
One of Auntie's chores for us was to figure out how to get the saw out of the basement. This had been a bit of a problem for quite a while. Years ago, she'd tried to sell it via Craig's List. Two young, strong guys paid cash, but couldn't move the damn thing.
For years, this had been plaguing her. Motor's shot. It's gotten rusty. And. Bonus. No one can move it.
Today, I decided to take a look at it.
This effort opened me to grandpa Al's spirit. His was a spirit that didn't pay close attention to what he was wearing.
He was a Madison Avenue executive back in his heyday. Think of the Mad Men TV show. That was my partner's grandfather's era. Men wore sport coats and ties to play golf on the weekends and drink fancy cocktails like Old Fashioned's and Rob Roy's.
The hulking beast of a table saw was a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog number 113.27520. It crouched in it's own corner of the basement, a worn old relic. Once, it had been fearsome, with a 10" carbide blade that would slash off the fingers of the careless. Now, the motor is as dead as Al. And it's taken on a bit of a patina from holding up kitty-litter buckets and gardening tools.
I had to clear a path to be able to present myself to this elder god of woodwork.
The saw had two add-on table extensions. They were the first thing to go. They're castings that form an open lattice, machined beautifully on the top, and tapped carefully with holes to bolt them to the table.
There was an ancient socket wrench set on the shelf behind the saw. So ancient the handles were bars of hexagonal steel with a right-angle bend. Nothing more. The sockets simply slipped on and off the piece of steel. No modern ratchet. Just a bar. But it's better than the pliers on a Leatherman tool, which was my original "plan." (Not really a plan. More of a concept.)
In a confined space, this means turning the bar a bit, taking it off the nut, putting it back on where it started, and turning the bar a bit. If I was smarter I would have driven to Lowe's and bought a few ratcheting box wrenches.
Al would not have wasted time or money like that. The socket wrench was there, it could be used. All it required was skill and patience.
I'd guess the table extensions weighed close to 10 pounds. Each.
After removing 20 pounds of parts, I still could not move the saw.
I'm wearing the clothes I wore to church. (My good jeans and a clean shirt with a collar. How things have changed in two generations.) This is -- auntie explained -- a classic Al move. He'd start a 10-minute repair, still wearing the suit and tie he wore to work on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Hours later, he'd have ruined a perfectly good tie and made a mess of an expensive shirt, and hadn't quite finished the 10-minute repair.
I didn't make quite so big a mess.
But, inhabited by Al's spirit, I chugged away and taking the saw apart with crappy old 60's vintage socket wrenches for four hours. The top table -- a magnificant cast-steel piece -- must have weighed over thirty pounds. It had another 10 to 15 pounds of castings for table saw positioning hardware (the frame to to lift the blade and rotate it) bolted under it.
Even the handles on the cranks for moving the saw were huge metal contraptions with two set screws to make damn sure the knob stayed in place no matter what.
I had become my partner's grandfather incarnate. I was doing a job that was huge, while poorly prepared and overdressed.
I have proper diesel-mechanic coveralls that I wear for engine maintenance on the boat. Did I wear them? No. They were in the closet upstairs.
After a half-hour with the shop vac, we think we can get the pieces into the truck and down to the metal recycling place. The stuff is heavy and awkward as sin to move around. Every action has the potential for finger-pinching and toe-breaking.
Yes, it's a classic tool. With some serious work, a collector might be able to replace the motor with an equivalent. They could clean the worm-screw rods to get them to work correctly. I think they'd need to replace the clutch spring for the clamp that secured the blade. It looked broken when I finally got it apart. Most important, they'd need to scrape off the rust and polish it to make it look like the old Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog picture.
I'm not sure a collector with that kind of time and energy really exists.
Luckily, Al's ghost didn't lead me to ruin what I was wearing. I was only covered in dust, loose rust, old sawdust, and spiderwebs. I felt good using Al's old heavy, crystal rocks glasses for a celebratory dram of Laphroaig.