Over the past few days I've been putting in some bench time working on the preliminary stages of a project. This particular project has a lot of glue-ups that require several hours of cure time during which I can hang up my gear, kick back and recover from my heroic efforts. (As I'm writing this up I'm also waiting out another cure time.)
When I came back to the bench after one of these cure/recovery times I found my shop apron laying on the concrete floor of the barn.
'Well that's strange' I thought. When not actually wearing it the apron hangs on the outside of my storeroom door, which, truth be told, if very rarely ever actually closed. This leaves anything hanging there at the mercy of the winds that sometimes whip through the barn when I have the doors at both ends open, which is pretty much all the daylight hours.
I also keep a long apron hanging there that I wear when I'm working at the lathe, along with a throw-away pair of old pants I don't mind getting paint, oil and other gunk on, as well as a lightweight, long-sleeved shirt where I can grab it when I need protection from the often intense Texas sun. The shirt is usually the one that gets blown off the nail, not the apron. In fact this would be the first time ever either of the heavy aprons had blown off it's nail.
(Contrary to what westerners seem to believe, bare skin is not the proper response to hot, sunny conditions! If you don't believe me just go lay your hand on the hood of that old truck sitting out back. Not only has the UV faded and cracked the paint, but the dang thing is hot isn't it! So tell me, just how is that any different from your exposed skin? Unless it's protected with a lightweight layer of cloth that can deflect the solar energy and stop the UV rays, such as desert dwellers the world over have been doing for thousands of years, how is your skin in the sun any different than that truck in the sun?? Other than the fact that that the truck can't die of heat exhaustion nor contract skin cancer.)
Only turns out nothing had blown off of anything, instead one of the webbing straps had failed. Don't ask me how. It doesn't really look like it's been cut, the edges are just a little too raged for that, but there's also no sign of excessive wear at that point either.
Oh well. Whatever the cause it needs to be fixed.
Because of it's location I couldn't just overlap the two ends and staple them together. (Yes, I admit it. That was the first fix I thought of.) This would have made the two straps down to the top of the apron lopsided. Now I know none of us are perfectly symmetrical, least of all me, but I'm not that crooked!
So a little hunting through some scraps turned up a bit of webbing of the right width. True, it wasn't the right color, but just who am I trying to impress anyway?!
I temporarily put my current project on hold and cleared it off the bench to make way for the sewing machine. The machine just happened to have lime green thread in it from whatever the last sewing project was. True, I could have rummaged around and found the black thread I know is in that bag somewhere, but again, who cares?
I butted up the two ends of the original webbing so they would stay the same overall length and then tacked on a short length of new webbing to bridge the gap and I'm good to go again. (Though since I butted the ends up tight, technically there was no gap to bridge so. . . Oh never mind.)
Thankfully I didn't expose anything - well - horrible, during this wardrobe malfunction or I might have been liable for some unfortunate observer's lifetime of therapy!!
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