I’ve always been a lazy perfectionist. For every project I’ve ever done, there have been hours and hours of thinking, rethinking, and overthinking and a lack of motivation to actually try something due to a fear of failure. Why try if you know you are going to fail?
But I got to thinking about it (I know) on my drive home the other day. I was sitting at a light that was red for ten years yearning for thoughts to occupy my mind when I took the lottery ticket that I had just purchased out of my cup holder. I looked down at it and turned it over in my hands a couple times as I had an epiphany. The epiphany was complimented by an angry little man in a gigantic truck laying into his horn right behind me but that’s not important.
I epiphisized? I epiphimated? I realized that my firefighting project was just like the lottery ticket. The odds are astronomically small that I get any money out of it, no one else cares about it if it isn’t worth millions of dollars, and if I lose I’ll get the entertainment of trying. There are only two differences that I can spot between the ticket and my project.
1.) The odds of making money back on my project are astronomically low, but still orders of magnitude greater than a Powerball ticket.
2.) I’ll actually LEARN something by doing the project.
After arriving at my conclusion I made the obvious choice to put my head down and work on the things I already knew how to do that would move my project forward…
Well… That’s what I should have done.
What I actually did was “borrow” a welder from the auto shop that I worked at in high school. I was going to figure out how to weld if it was the last goddamn thing I did. Turns out welding isn’t a skill that you can just pick up in an afternoon. But you can pick it up in an afternoon and the following morning. Once I got the settings figured out (the internet will tell you how to set the machine up) I practiced on all of the scraps that I had and very, very quickly ran out.
Naturally, instead of practicing more I just welded the actual frame together (Pictured above). It turned out… alright for a prototype.
Hopefully, when I get to production I’ll be able to get one of those fancy fireball tool fixture tables and maybe an actual welder who has formal training and an idea of what they’re doing, but until then I’m going to proudly rock my 3D printed fixtures and my premium deluxe harbor freight jack stands/surfaceless welding table.
