...Shouts the wife in a panic. Well, I won't leave you in high suspense - there were no injuries and no major damage.
Well, this weekend I was building a lumber rack and cutting some pipe with the cutoff saw. I took the extra precautions of sweeping the sawdust up, placing a sheet of drywall behind the saw to dampen the majority showering sparks, gas cans outside, and had on my safety glasses. So, I thought I was good to go and I did look around the shop after each 10' section of pipe was cut into 6 pieces.
There's one thing about having your shop in a garage or any building that you share usage with others. Unbeknownst to me, my wife had placed the gas powered line trimmer back in the garage in between sections of pipe. On top of that, she's developed a habit of not tightening caps(my 2yo daughter can easily loosen caps my wife tightens.) So, the line trimmer was lying on the floor behind me as I was cutting pipe with my ear muffs on and I faintly hear fire fire. I turned around to see a flaming puddle roughly the size of folded newspaper under the line trimmer which is next to my plywood rack. Thankfully, the garage door was open to allow pipe to be brought in easily. I picked up the line trimmer and heaved it into the grass about 20 feet from the garage. Hear comes the wife with the fire extinguisher ready to spray the spot on the floor. I immediately recalled someone's recent posting about flaming curls coming from a turning and the fire jumping all over the place. Since the spot on the floor was starting to die down and nothing else was in jeopardy, I told her not to spray it but spray the line trimmer instead(I didn't say before its gas tank exploded to avoid causing her to really panic.) With the line trimmer doused and the spot on the concrete floor burned off, the potential disasterous outcome was avoided.
While we were lucky, it could have easily been otherwise. The good news is that I finally have permission to build a shed to get the lawn stuff out of the woodshop, I mean garage. That, of course, will give me more room to put more tools in there too!!
BTW, the lumber rack is done and it's helping out on the organization greatly. The rack itself is 24' wide by 8' high by 16" deep. I've also tied a fishing line from both adjoining walls so I can measure the distance from the string to the wall to monitor bowing of that wall. There's going to be a lot of weight hanging on that!!
Thanks for reading and thankfully, I won't have my own "birth of a shop" thread to create at this time.
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