Two Funny Job-Site Stories

Construction accidents it's kind of a horrifying topic I mean terrible things happen terrible Falls guys falling under rebar you know getting rolled on by forklifts and falling off ladders and cutting off parts of their body and heck I've shot myself with a nail gun five times in different places and for different reasons none of them really very smart but there is one construction accident I was not an eyewitness to but it happened to a young man who was working for the same company I was working for at the same time I was working for them so this is not just hearsay nail guns Hitachi nail guns they're great you've probably seen how this had taught you nail guns getting worn out enough that it sometimes doesn't set a 16 penny nail it does great with eight did you see what I just did you can hold the trigger and bump again to safety or you can put it against a safety and pull the trigger either way so one of the jobs that has to be done is nailing off sheer panels your panel is the plywood that's nailed to the framework that gives the wall system or a roof system or a floor system shear strength that is lateral strength that is resistance to overturning so it's usually half-inch plywood that's put up against the studs and nailed on a particular nail spacing shear panel so in the American Southwest where so much is is broken up into peace work agreements there are guys whose only task is to nail off shear wall a lot of those guys exercising their productive instinct and minimizing their instinct to self-preservation will wire down the trigger so that gun is always ready damn to shoot all the time the advantage that is you can grab the gun by the end of the rack and nail ten feet in the air pow pow pow pow pop minutes it works great now there's another trick that piece workers use and that is if you've got to climb up on a wall or up on a roof and you don't want to try to climb and carry your nail gun you take your nail guns and you throw it over the wall and it goes over the wall and dangles on the hose and then when you climb up on the wall you can grab the hose and pull it up smart right and it kind of so this one particular young man combined these two production tricks he had the trigger where it wired down for sure nailing and he came to a wall that he needed to climb so he threw the nail gun over the wall and it swung around between two studs and came back and nailed his unit to his thigh and when I say unit I mean his unit I think as soon as we heard about that all production on the jobsite stopped for a while that is simultaneously the most horrifying and the most hilarious construction accident I've ever heard of and it really happened and I hope you never let it happen to you do you know what a water truck is that concrete companies use it's a it's a double axle tractor on it kind of a dump truck frame only instead of a tilt bed it's got a water tank and it holds thousands and thousands of gallons of water and it has a PTO so you've got all the horsepower that diesel engine under the hood running a pump that will evacuate that tank in short order it'll spray water fore-and-aft and to the sides and you can run it out of hoses you got to have them when you're getting compaction and their main water truck driver I think they had three trucks was dick a dick was a Vietnam vet he was a serious man he was about exactly half as white as he was tall and he was six feet tall and he was not fat and you could just tell you didn't mess around with dick so one particular day dick was hustling back and forth on the on the west side of Las Vegas between tracks and kerb jobs and always on the radio always behind and he pulled into tried to pull into what was I think you know the shelter lane the turn lane I think on rainbow avenue and some young tuff jock and it convertible thought that he needed that space in the turn lane where dick was or he couldn't see by where dick was and his big red Freightliner or mac or whatever it was and so the kid in the the convertible starts mouthing off and he escalates I don't know what dick said probably not much and the kid escalates and he's getting madder and madder and pretty soon he's getting ready to he's shaking his fist and screaming at the top of the lung as long I'm going to kill you and Dick thought about that for a second and wrapped that diesel engine up right up to the top of the power curve and through the right valve open and filled that convertible up with water and off he drove and he went to the job that he had the service and he went back to the office expecting to get his last check and nobody ever said a word about it so the moral of the story is be careful who you threaten and be sure you understand what their capacity is before you open your mouth so these are a couple of the highlight stories of my construction career of events that are hilarious and horrifying I got a few more I'll share with you and I bet you have got zillions of them so if you have a construction incident that is either hilarious or horrifying or horrifyingly hilarious or hilariously horrifying shehram let me hear them I would have to learn about some of the calamities that you have either seen or survived

Channel: Essential Craftsman

Views: 264,234

Rating: 4.9657726 out of 5

Keywords: Revenge Story, Accident, Nailgun, Injury, essential craftsman, blacksmith, craftsman, anvil

Id: rP2Qn8VTkTo

Length: 6min 1sec (361 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2017