Good work Bob! It's always a scared then happy moment in that instant of the answer to the question "does it live?"
@slimpickins, amazing how the heart rate goes down when it comes to life.
Keep at it with the CPAP. Sounds like you're pretty diligent. I use mine religiously and average 0.2 to 0.6 events/hour.
Roger, thanks for the encouragement. The test, done in 2011, indicated my O2 levels dropped into the 70s and with my normal resting heart rate in the 40s, I scared the **** out of the doctor. He, in turn, scared the **** out of me. I have forgotten what it was like to wake up exhausted and feeling awful. I missed a night a few years ago when the power went out and four nights when I was in the hospital for a couple of surgeries.
In true Garage Journal fashion, "Great, another tool I didn't know I needed - until now."
Roger, as I get older it seems I drop stuff more often. Bending over or crawling around the floor to retrieve them isn't as trivial as it once was. Any tool that reduces those activities comes home with me.
I didn't get my flexible magnet tool until a few months ago! I made do for quite a long time with a flexible grabber. And telescoping magnet wand.
I was roaming the aisles of my local Advance Auto, trying to find something I could buy... some tool or chemical... and it's... very hard to find something... and I'm trying to buy
something when I visit, and not just treat them as an oil and battery recycling station. Mail order has been very hard on brick and mortar.... (on the other hand, yeah, I shop elsewhere for most auto parts, yeah, mailorder.)
So flexible magnet grabber was on my recent somethings. I also bought a not-very-long
inflexible grabber from Harry J. Epstein this summer, just so I could go old school someday, if I need to...
WWII Era Adco Mechanical Fingers WWII Era Adco Mechanical Fingers
www.harryepstein.com
@Squankum, I bought a small General tool telescoping magnet many years ago and a few years before Sears went under, I bought a bigger one that came with a detachable mirror. Along with the flexible magnet grabber, I ordered a set of four pocket, small, medium and large inflexible magnet grabbers so I can have a couple in the garage and a couple in the shed/workshop.
The IBM Customer Engineer toolkit I was issued in 1964 came with a flexible grabber. It works great but I added a longer one to the collection a few years ago because I dropped a rubber clamp face in the frame of the '72 Corvette. Tried retrieving it with the short grabber but only succeeded in pushing it further down the frame.
Right there with you Bob on the sleeping numbers.
Shorty, ever since I was diagnosed with sleep apnea I wondered how many people die from its side-effects. I don't recall anyone dying of "sleep apnea" when I was growing up but I do remember many "dying peacefully in their sleep."
I have this saved for years on my computer, seems like a good time to post it:
I have an elderly magnet wand and a 'grabber' which I suspect is 40+ years old. It makes me think of those games with the claw you see in bars or arcades. I got it with some other used tools.
One tool I infrequently use but which is a big time-saver, is a mirror on a wand. I have a couple one round, smaller, and one rectangular and longer. I also have the HFT color fiber-optic camera which saved a kitten in the wall of my Miami in-law's home. We could hear the crying, and went out and bought the camera, drilled a hole, and there staring back at me was a scared kitten, covered in plaster dust. My Porter-Cable Tiger saw, with its movable position blade, made an opening large-enough to rescue the kitty. We found a home for it, and the kitty lived happily ever-after.
Philip, I've got you beat on the age of my black-handled claw -- it's about to turn 58.
I have that Craftsman round mirror on a magnetic stick along with a dental mirror from the same IBM toolkit given to me in 1964. So far I've only used the HF boroscope for mundane stuff like lost bolts and tools. I pull the batteries after using it so it takes a few minutes to get it working. Hopefully I never need it for saving a life.
I have the small Porter Cable 12v reciprocating saw advertised for cutting PVC pipe.
For years I've used a GM crank sensor magnet about the size of a One A Day vitamin, held on a big old thumb plunger grabber. A friend at GM gave it to me years ago; it was my introduction to super magnets. I find lots of uses for magnets around the shop, I believe car compasses all point towards my place as they go by.
I've had one of the Rigid fiber optic peepers a long time. It's older, you can't get the camera thingy end into a spark plug hole, but it has made quite a few projects easier - looking into walls before opening them, looking under the bed to find if any monsters live under there for a three year old, finding water leaks under the subflooring in a trailer..... The only real problem is figuiring which is up on the screen when in a wall.
Gerry, I tried ordering some super magnets a few years ago but they never shipped my order and never charged my credit card. I currently have two and both came from washing machines. They use them on the door of front loaders to set the interlock switch so you can't open the door when the machine is running. When the plastic cover breaks I get a nice super magnet. Only problem is storage. I tried putting them side-by-side on the garage freezer but they stack themselves up when I get one of them within an inch of the other. Once they stack themselves up I have a hard time separating them.
Your Ridgid looks a lot like my HF Cen-Tech boroscope. It won't fit through a spark plug hole either and even after flipping the image, I am rarely certain what I'm seeing on the screen matches reality. I keep rotating the image and adjusting the brightness but I am still easily confused.
