Are you using the right tool?

Good morning, Gaftek. This is your safety minute for the week of November ninth. This week's topic is a simple question: Are you using the right tool for the job? Here's a story from Burnie this weekend. He and his son were putting up a plywood ceiling in a room at the house. They did it right. Staging set up, ladders in place, everything by the book. They got the first sheet up, and it was a fight. A four by eight sheet of plywood weighs forty to seventy pounds, and they were holding it over their heads, arms locked, standing on staging. It was hard on the shoulders, and if one of them had lost his grip or his footing, somebody was getting hurt. So they stopped, and they thought about it. Burnie drove to Home Depot and rented a drywall lift. Seventy dollars for the whole day, about an hour round trip, and the rest of that ceiling went up easy, low effort, probably faster than doing it by hand. They finished the whole job that same day. That one tool was built for exactly that job. It took the shoulder strain out of the equation. It took the fall off the staging with a sheet in your hands out of the equation, and the job got easier, not harder. Here's the point. A lot of us think working safe means working slower, less efficient, more expensive, and sometimes, yes, it does. But a lot of the time, the safe way and the easy way are the same way. You just have to stop long enough to see it. So this week, before you muscle through something, ask yourself three questions. What tool was made for this job? Is there a safer way to do it? Is there an easier way to do it? That might be a drum dolly instead of walking a drum, a lid lifter instead of your fingers, the right size wrench instead of a cheater bar, a ladder instead of a bucket. Most of you are out on service calls by yourselves. There's nobody there to hand you the right tool and nobody there to catch you if something goes wrong. You're the one making the call, so make it early. Before you leave the shop, look at the work order and ask, "What's this job going to need, and is it on the truck?" And if you get there and you don't have the right tool, stop and make a good decision. Go get it, rent it, or come back to it. An hour and seventy dollars is cheap. A torn shoulder is not. Work safe. See you next week.