Peen it Out

WOW! It has been awhile. What can I say? I have been busy. I have been hiking biking, working, building a mountain bike trail, collecting wild black berries, reading, playing volleyball and softball, and even golfing among the other thousand things I have been up too. I have been working on my photography skills but no pictures to post about… yet. Don’t fret though August 10-12 is suppose to be prime time for the Perseids meteors.
Every year I make an attempt to fly fish that usually ends poorly. Fly fishing is a very difficult from tying the flies to the line to casting, catching and bringing in the fish. It literally is an art form that I just havent mastered or have even come close. This year will be different. I have been studying up and practicing my casting. I read up on the fishing reports for the Mad River just down the road and it said the report is good after a few rains last week. So I gathered up my gear and was going through it when I ran into a little problem. My reel was missing a rivet and was allowing a piece to swing freely (sorry didn’t to think to take a picture first). I needed to fix it. A small screw and nut wouldn’t work because it wouldn’t allow the reel to run without the line snagging on the nut so I needed a rivet. With no small rivet in sight I had to make my own…

Now this is where I pause to say, “Let me show you something, I think, every man should know;”

You know what this?

Ok so it’s a hammer but it has a proper name; ball-peen hammer. And you use it to “peen” rivets, hence the name. Now the flat part I have used a million times to hammer a nail but never have I “peened” a rivet. Until now. The round part is used to “mushroom” out a small piece of metal, in my case a small tack nail, pulling the other end tight and making a rivet.  And this is my end result;

Not pretty but it works well. I finished and thought to myself, “Yea I could have gotten a real rivet and worked on it, practiced and polished it, but I was proud of the work I did and it fixed the piece I needed to fix.”
I know this post is short but I just wanted to share a bit of knowledge and give you a heads up that I haven’t forgotten about you. I have plenty to write about including my yearly fly fish attempt but no time to write so when I get a few minutes I’ll be posting more, I promise. Until next time…. Gotta go.

“I was awfully happy, not because life was so good, but because it was my life, and I was in it.”                         -Scott Spencer