Ouch my eye!

Today this project nearly came to an end as quickly as it started.

As the second Friday in my laser re-build I decided to take on the last few bits of stripping necessary required to get the chassis ready for stripping and paint. Mainly I had a bunch of rusted in and stripped screws that needed to be removed to get off the last few bits of hardware. And there is the metal plate that sat underneath the membrane keypad that is badly warped and needed to be removed. This plate was unfortunately spot-welded into place, so I needed to bang it out with a hammer. [I would have ground off the welds, but the work space is too small to get at the welds] I’m doing the re-build at my office, so banging indoors during business hours is not an option. As such, I took the chassis outside behind the loading docks to do the noisy work.

After successfully removing the metal plate, and some other PEMs that were toast, I grabbed my tools and headed back in. In less than the two minutes it took me to go in, and come back out, a scrap metal vulture had come by, picked up the 100lb chassis carcass, and started to drive off, without asking anybody if it was truly scrap he could take. I walked out the door just as he was starting to drive off, and I immediately started chasing him down and yelling “STOP!”. The guy kept going, I’m pretty sure he both saw and heard me, but tried to get away. I managed to almost catch up to his truck… He wasn’t stopping so I tried to reach out [while running after him] to bang on the side of his truck to really get his attention. Suddenly my feet slipped out from under me and I hit the ground. Not sure if it was sand, or if I tripped on something, but there I was sprawled out on the ground. At this point the vulture stopped. I’m pretty sure he was scared that he had tagged me with his car, or he would have kept going. I managed to get up right away, and verbally laid into the guy for stealing my chassis. He weakly apologized claiming that he didn’t know it wasn’t scrap. [I’ll admit it looks pretty scrappy right now, but there is no way he didn’t see me working on it, given the timing] He unloaded the chassis and drove off.

I now have road rash on the left side of my face, my left hand, and severe bruising on my left side from the impact. My hand looks & feels the worst, it looks like I was in a fight and took out most of someones teeth with my fist. (I may have to use that as an explanation, as telling people I tripped over my own feet running is a bit too embarrassing!)

Lesson: Call the cops!

I know the guy is just trying to make a living, but to me what he did is theft. It wasn’t after-hours, it was mid-day, so he should have attempted to come in and ask if he could take it. While I did get the chassis back in the end, next time I’m just taking the license plate and calling the police.

Oh, and I managed to get off all the other remaining hardware as well, so the chassis is officially ready to be stripped. My hand was too sore to take any pictures, so I’ll try to get some before I send it off for stripping. I won’t post any pictures of myself, or my injuries… nobody needs to see that, the laser gore is bad enough!

Don’t let it be said that I didn’t put my blood, sweat, and tears into this project!