Greatest Tools #2: Victorious Vise-Grip

Up in the Sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s that champion of champions Super Vise-Grip.

Actually it’s my vise-grip on a piece of kite string held aloft by my head shaking wife, while I lay on my back in the drive to photograph it against the sky (why don’t wives get the humor in these things?).

But, it really is a super hero of tools. Here are a few of its many wonderful uses.

• It will open the most stubborn of beer bottles (I disavow any first hand knowledge of this).
• It will easily clamp on to the little nub left after the tine breaks off your zipper and pull that sucker right up to your belt buckle.
• It is the only tool I know that is specifically designed to unscrew any bolt or nut you have already ruined by stripping it.
• Excellent for clamping on to and rocking-back-and-forth-until-they-break bolts that are too stupid to come off correctly.
• If you turn it around it makes a pretty good hammer for banging on stubborn parts.
• Good for clamping things steady on your work bench.
• Great for crimping closed a leaking radiator tube (at least until you can get to the service station).
• A short term fastener to hold together two pieces of most anything from which the bolt has been lost.
• A right impressive noggin knocker in a rough and tumble.
• It will also clamp open the repair manual to the right page while your replacing your alternator or dynamo.

Second only to the infamous duct tape as the best tool of all time.

Pray tell what dastardly situations has the viceless vise-grip saved you from?

Reg Adkins writes on behavior and the human experience at (elementaltruths.blogspot.com).