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Rating: 
Summary: Small Wonder
Review: By Bill Marsano. Putting in a new faucet means taking out your old one, so you head off to the hardware store. So far, so good, but because you are an unrepentant sinner it is not Ace, the place with the helpful hardware man; neither is it, say, Home Depot, which has a pretty aggressive program of training its employees (they call 'em 'associates') so they will understand what you want even when you don't. Which is the case just now. You need that weird little tool with the sping-loaded half-claw gripper that works at right angles to the handle, and the clerk you're talking to breathes through his mouth, can't focus more than one eye at a time and can't think of anything to say except "If you don't see it on the shelf, we're out of it." (That, brothers, is the Official Lie of American retailing.)Only then does the manager arrive. You start over and within 10 seconds he stops you and says, "Right--a basin wrench. Why didn't you say so?" And now you're the one who feels like a dope. As you would if you needed trammel points (or heads), a spud wrench, some castellated nuts or a box of pinch dogs. Your house and workshop are full of such things or should be, but they aren't, so you have to go get them at the least convenient times from clerks singularly ill-equipped to assist you. If you have this little book your life will be a lot easier, because you will be able to ask for things like angle stops, hawks, ballcocks and four-in-hand rasps with the ease of a pro. These item,s have thjeir strange and partoicular little names because they are partocular things. A pinch dog, for example, is not exactly the same as a pinch puppy. We started with a sink, remember? With this book you'll flip to Part VIII (plumbing stuff), flip past fixtures and fittings and pipes and valves until you come to implements of destruction, where sure enough between Plumbing Wrenches (p. 555) and Special Plumbing Tools (p. 571) you will find the basin wrench of your dreams, probably with a nice picture to help you out. Same goes for all other areas of do-it-yourself house-damaging--walls and floors, electrics, windows and more. All in all, you would think this is a very handy little book, but it's not. It is very useful and very helpful but not at all handy. In fact it's damned clumsy: It measures 4-1/4 by 5-1/2 inches and is about as thick as a brick. You can see that it isn't especially easy to flip through. Worse, the type and illustrations are commensurate with the page size, which means they're too small unless you're used to reading insurance contracts. OK, it's a good book--but if re-sized to the proportions of a standard paperback it would be terrific. Still, that's its only flaw.--Bill Marsano can drive a nail without hitting his thumb, but that's about it. What he's really good at is going to hardware stores on sale days.
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