Sledgehammer At Ten Paces

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Been off on a weird shift in another city for work. Kept me away here until I got back. Traveled all the way to Fredericton to rip out an out of date store interior so that new store fixture can be installed. This was in a mall so we had to be quiet until the mall closed. Sometimes it's really hard to be quiet when you're destroying things. Most of the early work was just dismantling things with battery powered drills and then hauling the smaller pieces to the dumpster. We all scavenge items when we can. I am now piano hinge rich. My wife has asked about building a lap desk for her and now I don't have to buy that somewhat expensive piece of hardware. I could build one for myself and each of the kids and still not cut into the two eight foot lengths we managed to squeeze into the car. After the mall closed and the people left we could make all the noise we wanted. One of our "problems" was two big cabinets each with an eight-foot-high panel of plate glass. It was built in such a way that there was no way to take it apart without breaking it (at least not quickly enough). We run into this pretty regularly. Our last job at the university we had an eight-foot mirror that had to come down. I tried to unscrew the brackets and on the first bracket, cracks shot out in all directions. I backed away slowly and fortunately, it didn't completely shatter. When you're standing in harm's way that much glass can make some pretty horrible lacerations even through protective gear. Our solution is to grab the little hand sledgehammer get everyone clear and launch it. I wish we had slow motion video of that one for Youtube. The explosion of glass was pretty spectacular. This job didn't go so well. My first throw just blew a big hole in the glass and it ended up taking five or six shots before we could safely get in there to use a shovel to knock the pieces stuck on the edges to the ground. No collateral damage, no cuts and no slivers, we did a good job.