There Is No Mechanical “Black Magic”

(Post 7  in a series for DIY beginners)

Well, it’s Friday already, wrapping up my second week of posts! I just want to start off by letting you all know how moved I am by your kind comments, links and positive reviews. Thank you!

Next week we’ll start with a little story that I’m hoping will inspire you to have the kind of  can-do attitude that will allow you to push boundaries, and then we’ll talk about selecting and buying tools, and how just hanging out in building supply stores can be very rewarding, even if you don’t spend a cent!

Alternate title for this week’s post:

“Things Will Not Explode Just Because You Look At Them.”

I’m hoping that the posts about bent nails and flying screws have given you a bit of a glimpse into one of the secrets that handy people know. Today I’d like to conclude that discussion and put the idea of mysterious mechanical and electrical forces to rest forever. You are going make huge advances toward being mechanically independent if you remember the two important points that those posts illustrated:

1. There is always a reason that things do or do not happen.

2. Those reasons are knowable – and finite!

I’m always amazed at how normally “can do” people become paralyzed when a household appliance makes a weird noise. We are realists, with no place in our lives for “hocus pocus,” but watch the reaction when one of our quietly subservient machines starts to rebel! From somewhere deep in our subconscious an unreasoning fear forces itself upon us – the fear that there are strange forces at work and that the electrical appliance could suffer a catastrophic breakdown, wreaking devastation equal to that caused by a small nuclear weapon!

Another example of this thinking is something that happens during winter in my part of the world – the formation of a thin layer of ice on an otherwise bare road. I‘m not going to pretend that “Black Ice” isn’t dangerous, but it might come as a surprise to some people that a car will not spin out of control, roll over multiple times and explode just because it hits a patch of the slippery stuff. There are things that you can do to increase your chances of surviving a black ice encounter, and panicking, jamming on the brakes and locking up is not one of them.

It’s not only in emergency situations that we find those wrong thinking patterns. When some people think of plumbing, electricity, automotive repairs, hammering a nail or measuring, they sometimes feel that for some strange reason they are doomed to failure, or just cannot learn all they need to know.

In the examples of the nails and the screws, we saw that there are logical reasons for nails bending and screws that seem out of control, and I want you to set aside your fears and remember one thing:

this rule applies to absolutely everything.

There is always a reason for a seeming lack of skill, and once you find out what it is, you’ve won! There is a finite number of reasons that an electrical problem might occur, and once you know them, you’ve got it beat! (Yes! Even electrical problems!) In any of these areas, there are no other mysterious forces hiding around the corner waiting to trick you. When we get through discussing just a few more empowering thinking patterns, we are going to talk about what it means when appliances make strange noises, and I’ll do my best to take the mystery out of home and auto maintenance and repair.

A quick note about posts like this: I know that some of you might be anxious to get into more of the hands on handy stuff, but please consider this: I firmly believe that being mechanically inclined and handy is as much a way of thinking, an outlook on life, as it is a skill set. I also believe that it’s only by adopting some of the thinking patterns that I’ve learned and attempted to identify and will be revealing in future posts similar to this one, that you’ll eventually enjoy true DIY independence.