What were we talking about?

Have you ever forgotten you owned a tool? Not something small and easy to misplace, but something substantial and not particularly inexpensive? I did.

I’ve been working on an article about those compact tools I like so much and have commented on several times here. (For example: “Just Right”) There are lots of cordless candidates to write about, of course, but corded compacts have only recently started making an appearance. My article was pretty much done, and I was tweaking it with some user quotes when one of the woodworkers I was corresponding with mentioned how much he liked a particular corded compact tool, the Porter-Cable 371 belt sander.

I had completely forgotten about the existence of the PC 371 and the stir it made when it was introduced a couple years ago. Forgetting about its existence is all the more embarrassing because I own one. Even more embarrassing, I recently had a small panel-leveling task for which it would have been perfect – if I’d only remembered I had it.

And it’s not like those screw extractors I wrote about a while back. Things like that are not only easy to lose, but it’s easy not to remember if you ever bought them before. No, the PC 371, although compact, is a little workhorse of a belt sander. And selling for around $100 these days, it’s not particularly cheap, either.

Including that sander in my article is a perfect addition. Not only that, I have another small leveling job for a project I’ll be completing this weekend it’ll be great for. But it took a casual remark made by someone a few hundred miles away for me to realize my mind had somehow completely deleted its existence. Presumably to make room for some data my brain deemed more important at the time. Star Trek trivia, probably.

They say the memory is the first thing to go, so I guess it’s time for me to start worrying about the second thing, whatever that is.

Unfortunately, I don’t recall.

Till next time,

A.J.