Dang I miss that crusty old bastard.

I have been helping his daughter and ex-wife clean out all the crap the guy had collected for the last fifty or so years.

The main focus has been on the garage and I finally got that finished last weekend.

Even after going to the dump there is still some crap in the back of his old truck I still gotta get rid of.

They wanted the garage cleaned out because the ex is going to move in with the daughter, she wants every damn thing the guy owned gone.

The very last thing I moved out of it was Chuck’s Bench Vise.

His daughter told me it was my prize for helping clean everything up.

She doesn’t know how close to the truth that statement was.

Here it is sitting next to the one I have had for at least 35 years, the red one in this picture.

They are both basically the same vise except his is bigger, heavier and not nearly as beat to shit as mine.

I find it sort of amusing to notice that over the years, these same Chinesium vises have gotten smaller and smaller.

I’m betting his is even older than mine and I know for a fact that what Horror Fright is selling now, for the same price I paid for mine all those years ago, is about 2/3’s the size of mine now.

The reason I say I can hear Chuck laughing at me is because after I got mine unbolted and sat down next to his with no problem, I bent down to grab his up and sit it on the stand I just took the other one off of and immediately threw my lower back out.

I knew I was fucked before it was an inch off the ground but I already had some momentum behind me so I very quickly decided to suck it up and finish getting it up in the stand.

That fucked me even worse because it needed to be about belly high and I had to stop and get a better grab on it before I could heave the heavy bastard up far enough to set it down.

That caused yet another wicked spasm in my lower back.

By the time I got it up enough to sit one corner down and finish sliding it the rest of the way on, my lower back was just screaming at me.

All in less than ten seconds.

I kept on going to get it situated and get some new mounting bolt holes marked out and drilled but when I had to bend down and dig out my bolt bin to find some bigger fasteners I almost fell over and had to grab ahold of my belt sander stand to even get back up.

About an hour later I finally got it mounted and cleaned up.

Trust me, I paid for that all day, all night last night and just about fifteen minutes ago I was able to grab the arms on my recliner and twist enough to pop my lower back back in.

I was popping Ibuprofen off and on all damn day yesterday.

After I got finished with that little project I went out and pulled the battery charger off the riding lawnmower, put some gas in it and fired the cantankerous old bastard up.

Much to my amazement, it actually didn’t take any other action on my part after sitting outside all Winter.

I had a tarp on it when I parked it but it was laying next to it all wadded up after some wind caught it at some point.

So then I went round and round out in the front yard scalping the grass good and proper so as to avoid having to do it again too soon.

Mission accomplished.

After all that activity I came in and collapsed back into the recliner.

Now that my back is popped back in I think I am going to go do some more Piddle Farting out in the garage.

The front seat of both trucks are still full of crap I pulled out of his garage that I didn’t want to get wet so I need to do some Triage on that.

I am going to give my old vise to my Oldest Boy as he recently bought a house and has an empty garage.

Actually, I have SEVERAL things that are going over there at some point.

He even knows about a couple of them….

Heh Heh Heh.