Harbor Freight

My partner Dennis is an inveterate jerry-rigger.  You know what a jerry-rig is---a quick, temporary fix that sometimes ends up being permanent.  Like, when the lever on the electric tea-kettle breaks off, you just insert a chopstick.  Works perfectly.  Economical; saves a trip to Target.  Of course, you are one chopstick short for your bowls of rice, but that won’t emerge until much later.  

Jerry-riggers rely on many bits and pieces of stuff for quick fixes---usually sorted into canning jars and loose tea tins that line the back of the workbench in the basement.  But when these riches fail, Dennis reluctantly yields to the last resort: the hardware store.

Dennis used to run to Gill-Roy’s, but the closest one---on Flushing Road---closed.  Not enough business, the staff said.  Property values declined, people stopped fixing things up.  So Dennis found a new hang-out: Harbor Freight.

Harbor Freight Tools is the working persons’ tool and equipment go-to place.  It was founded in 1977 as a catalog company.  It’s still family owned (according to their website).   “At a time when average folks need to stretch their dollars as far as possible, you can count on Harbor Freight Tools to continue to deliver on our founding commitment. Every day we deliver exceptional quality tools at ridiculously low prices.”

Flint’s Harbor Freight is completely average and very dollar stretching.  It’s not the usual place for suburban weekend do-it-yourselfers.  Sometimes you’ll see them---probably sent over from the big box stores.  They look dazed and desperate as they realize they’ve entered vise and drill press land.  

Surprisingly, the Flint store is very female.   Of course, you see a lot of women in Home Depot and Lowes.  They are selecting paint colors or lighting, or bathroom fixtures.  At Harbor Freight women roam the drill bit aisles.  And what’s more, women---middle-aged women---are on the floor helping them with real tools.  Maybe years back they would have worked in the shop.  Today they work at Harbor Freight.

Compared to Home Depot or Lowes, the Harbor Freight store is small.  So small that if I call out to Dennis, he’ll hear me.   The aisles are narrow and the shelves tightly packed.  No bulky ten- foot platform ladders here.   A woman in her fifties girdled in a padded back support belt with suspenders is helping Dennis.  Her name tag says “Patti.” They stand at a side wall that’s lined with drills and circular saws.  I’m sitting on a low stack of wooden dollies.  Dennis ponders an 18 volt 3/8” cordless drill/driver versus a drill/driver that plugs in.  He says he wants the consistent power that comes with a plug in. But the cordless gives you short-time power that’s flexible.  Then, again, the plug in would need an extension cord . . .  They move along the wall; Patti drags her hand lightly across the boxes as she goes.  According to Patti, her husband favored the plug in too, but then it wasn’t handy when he needed it in hard places.  “That’s what I told him,” says Patti.  “So what’s the use of all that power anyway?”   Dennis goes for the cordless.  Patti has won.   

We go to check out.  Now comes the deal: super coupons for free items---tape measures, scissors, and small flashlights.  I have to choose.  We already have a couple of tape measures and several pairs of scissors.  I go for the flashlight; maybe we’ll have a dinner party and use them as favors. 

In Los Angeles we go to Harbor Freight too.  This one’s in Lomita, a small city in LA County that straddles Pacific Coast Highway as it winds along toward Long Beach.   Dennis needs a digital multi-meter, and then maybe some bungee cords, and there’s a bench brush on sale. Clutching his list and a sheaf of Harbor Freight ads, Dennis forges ahead.  Meantime, I hold open the front door for an older woman in glasses with a gray Dutch cut.  She pushes a cart full of stuff toward the parking lot, the crumpled tails of her checked flannel shirt flapping below her old sweat shirt.

Like the Flint store, this Harbor Freight has its own local flavor.  The Lomita mix---white, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, Native American, Black, and Pacific Islander---roams the aisles.   Young Hispanic women stock shelves, or dart into the storeroom.  Young Mexican guys in A-shirts reach top shelves with tattoo-covered arms.  Middle-aged bikers, their gray hair pulled into thin pony tails, cluster in the automotive section.  A tall, elderly white-haired man, so thin that his leather belt holds up his pants in large gathers, confers with his wife, as he methodically turns the 24 pages of ads in the monthly savings book. 

The signs over the aisles are bi-lingual.  I stand with my head tilted back and sound out “cabrestantes” (winches) and “destornilladores” (screwdrivers).   A substantial Spanish vocabulary winds around the predictable layout: power tools, bench top tools, through clasps and clamps (woodworking), to abrasives and hammers, wrenches and sockets, pliers and screwdrivers, and measuring tools.  There’s a small section of odd garden tools.  “Home Accessories” contains a wheelchair and a walker. 

At the cash register the clerk rings up customers in English and answers the phone in Spanish.   She breaks in mid-sentence to offer Dennis an Inside Track Club membership.  Everyday he’d get a new product coupon.  I panic; he declines.  

Some friends tell me Harbor Freight stuff is crap.  But at my age, a life-time warranty holds no allure.  In contrast, entertainment is priceless.  Last year toward the end of summer Dennis came home with battery powered  fly swatter he’d gotten on sale for $3.99 (reg. $7.99).  We sat on the porch in a warm twilight sipping margaritas and swinging at mosquitoes.  Can’t beat Harbor Freight.

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Jerry Rig

Urban dictionary defines jerry-rig as fixing something non working in an unconventional way. Their etymology states that the term was created during World War II, a reference to the Germans who were termed "Jerries" as slang. Allies supposedly came across hastily repaired objects left by the retreating Germans.  Hence the admiring, resourceful Yanks invented the term Jerry-rig.

Wikipedia offers a competing derivation; it contends that the phrase's origin is nautical, deriving from jury-rig, a temporary mast erected to replace one carried away. The make shift mast would only survive one day--un jour. Presumably this jour migrated to jury and thence to jury-rig.  So the term dates back to sailing ships and predates American adventures in twentieth century war. 

I’m not sure about all this; it's pretty shaky web research.  Just the kind of “evidence” that I circle in red on student papers.  But whatever its historic origins, jerry-rig is a useful expression in life which is so often make-shift.  

Despite the term’s condescending connotations of something flimsy and shoddy, these temporary repairs sometimes outlive the original piece of equipment.  Such successful jerry-rigging depends upon equipment: wire, duct tape, C-clamps, and an assortment of screws, shims, and sealants.  All this in addition to a set of good tools that include a power drill.  Jerry-rig operations also benefit from a solid work bench (stationary vise highly recommended).  And above all, jerry-rig requires invention.  

Jerry-rig is the specialty of my partner, Dennis.  Through him I have learned to look differently at the broken objects of daily life.  To embrace potential, instead of succumbing to frustration, to visualize the material world working in alternative and unexpected ways.  To honor the originality praised by the romantics. Throwing something into the trash or even the Goodwill pile means that you just don’t rise to the challenges of life.  It’s not sporting---a rejection of improvisation, imagination, and the unconventional.   Going to the mall to buy a replacement means craven capitulation to the commercial (although we always seem to have a sheaf of expired Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons just in case).  

Last summer the switch on our tea-kettle cracked and broke off.  As you can see here, Dennis' solution was to hold down the internal lever with a chop stick. Presto! The little orange light goes on and soon the water is boiling.  English Breakfast tea will steep to its sable brown, caffeine-laden intensity. And no one has been electrocuted.  To turn the kettle off, you pull the stick out---and just toss it into a drawer until tomorrow.   No trace left to disturb kitchen décor. Of course, to insert the stick properly requires surgical precision.  In my early morning, pre-caffeine bleariness, I am neither patient, nor particularly adept with chop sticks. I need a flashlight to poke in the stick at just the right angle.

We are offspring of Depression generations and recall the stories of how homes and lives were held together and very little was thrown away.  Our family lore includes tales of the first refrigerator that replaced the old icebox, of sewing machines converted to electricity (my mother had one with an electric pedal), of knives and lawnmowers sharpened annually at the hardware store.   Any piece of good metal, wood, or rope was stored and saved.  What to do with such bits and pieces?  Out of habit we continue to coil wire and wind up rope.  We sort screws, nails, and bits of metal in tea tins and jelly jars.  We buy duct tape on sale in multiple rolls from teen-aged clerks who pronounce it “duck” tape.  (What do they envision with that webbed and quacking metaphor?)

The sturdy workbench in the basement of my house dates from the 1950s.  The builder constructed it.  Successive owners paneled its back wall with peg board and someone had thoughtfully left a few hooks.  Now the wall is now covered with tools.  Its dangling shop light has been augmented by old bathroom fluorescent rods also from the 1950s---salvaged and mounted on the beams.  Still working but in a new context. Good light is essential for jerry-rig work.

Dennis comes from the rich repair tradition of the mid-twentieth century.  His father and grandfather delighted in scavenging for broken equipment.  They fixed motors and re-built car engines.  Once they wired up a communication system from kitchen to garage so they could work in peace until dinnertime.  Dennis even built his first stereo set.  I marvel at this energy and precision, this depth of knowledge of the mechanical world.  How it can be mobilized in a small emergencies.  

My appreciation of jerry-rig has grown in recent years, while energy for re-furnishing the domestic material world around me has declined.  I’m increasingly immune to the whole lot of the redecorating enablers---Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Williams-Sonoma. Fatigued by their showrooms of coordinated objects. Making do with a jerry-rig is just fine, so long as things collapse at a leisurely pace.

  For more essays see East Village Magazine at  http://eastvillagemagazine.org/