I remember going into the hardware section of the "Quaraiding Co-operative store " in the Western Australian "wheatbelt" in the mid 1980s. They had all sorts of interesting stuff, some covered with dust, & still carrying tags with prices in "Pounds, Shillings & Pence" (we had gone over to Decimal Currency 20 years before!) I even bought an adze handle there----- nobody else had stocked them for years! In modern stores, unless you already know exactly where something is, you can walk around all day, & still not find it! And, it's not a leisurely stroll, like in the "Co-op", either------stop & you'll get run over by the slavering "reno" crowd.
Smarter hole-in-the-wall hardware stores carry product big box stores don't because they can't compete on price, but they can compete on product. The best hardware store I've ever been to was in Morristown (or Stowe--I can't remember), Vermont, years back. It's out in the middle of nowhere but it featured clever, time-saving, eclectic gadgets, hardware, fixtures, tools and home construction/maintenance type stuff. One could easily spend thousands there.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which are still under development. Law of Mechanical Repair - After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch & you'll have to pee. A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by blowing first. After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed. After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted. After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found on the bench.
I dropped a sparkplug nut whileI changing plugs in my 78 Subaru. It fell right into the empty plug hole. Mike N3PM.
'reno' crowd? here's a cool, shivery thought- maybe you stepped into a time warp! i spent a summer working in a feed store. the staff was mean and the customers worse. no civility at all. no 'please' or 'thank you' when i loaded stuff into their trucks. is it possible farm folk get little interaction with outside folks and don't develop civility? we got a weekly railcar of all kinds of feed; filled to the roof and packed into the door. we had no powered lifting/moving machine so i had to unload it by myself using a wood freight dolly. the railroad only allowed the car to sit for 3 days- then they started charging rental, so i had to hurry. not just to get it on the dock, but inside and in place. all for $1/hour in 1970. i'd come home dessicated from all the sweating, covered in feed dust (not a bad thing. i liked the smell), completely knackered. and it was worse on saturdays, their busiest day of the week. many years later i spent 20 years one weekend on a western kansas farm. clarification- those 2 days seemed like 20 years for all the work i did. i had a brand new pair of overalls that in 48 hours became a rag. and they were carhartt's! short summary: i got chased by a bull i thought was a cow. i got chased by a new mama cow i thought was a bull. i fell in a stock tank. i fell out of a stock tank into all the muddy poop around that same tank. i got spray-painted white while upwind of the sprayer. eaten alive by flies and mosquitos. did an ear tag check on 400 cows. that was interesting. each cow had a personal number and other tags for inoculations against various things. a missing tag had to be replaced because the usda guy came around to check the records and look the herd over. cattle would scrape them off on a fence post or each other or a tree. the tags were numbered and color-coded for each disease. i used binoculars to read them. if you got in their space they'd start moving and make it harder to read the numbers. the cattle were in separate pastures, the bulls separated from each other and the cows, and all fenced. there were 27 gates (i counted them) that, at the start, i had to get out, open, then close after driving through, then get back in. after a couple of gates i told the farmer i was going to ride on the tailgate and that sped things up. plus, i got a much needed breeze. kept a constant eye out for damaged fences. had to fix a windmill. had to climb it with tools and a grease gun. another windmill needed it's leather washer replaced, so had to pull the rods out (10 or 15 10-footers). sweated a lot. i looked like a walking water sprinkler. the contacts for the weekend were a welder come to fix a tractor and the fuel guy bringing gas and diesel for the overhead gravity tanks and topping off the equipment tanks. the second day was heaven- i got to go on a cattle drive! i could ride well enough to stay on and the horse knew his job so all went well. the only thing missing was a chuckwagon supper- beef, beans, and biscuits.
