Howdy folks. Glen Blamstead here. I bought a level at the auction last Saturday. Turns out it was only half right.
Now, in my defense, the auction was one of those farm sales north of Mora where you show up for a hay elevator and leave with a butter churn, three coffee cans of unmarked bolts, and a dog you did not previously own. I am not proud of the dog situation but she has settled in and now sleeps on my recliner like she paid the mortgage on it, so we have reached an accommodation.
The level looked fine on the table. Old aluminum, four foot, one of those honest tools that had been in somebody's shop since Nixon. I picked it up, sighted down the edge, tapped the bubble, and figured for two dollars I could not go wrong. Reader, I could go wrong.
I got it back to the shop and set it on the workbench, which I know for a fact is level because I checked it with a different level, which now that I think about it may also have been a suspect character. The bubble sat neatly between the lines and I thought, well, there we go, a bargain.
Then I flipped it end for end. The bubble drifted off to the side like it had somewhere better to be. I flipped it again. Back to the middle. Flip. Off to the side. Whoever calibrated this thing had committed fully to one direction and given up on the other. The horizontal bubble worked. The other three were purely decorative.
So I have a level that is half right, which is exactly the kind of thing that will bite you at the least convenient moment. You will use it eleven times and everything will be fine. On the twelfth time you will hang a door and spend the rest of the week wondering why it swings itself shut like a haunted rectory.
I brought the level out to the crew on Tuesday because we had a barndominium going up east of town and I wanted to see if anybody else could figure out what was going on with it. Tanner sighted down it, nodded, said it was fine. I flipped it. He said, well, that end is not fine. I said correct, that is the problem.
Tanner is one of those crew members who does not really do jokes. He processes information. He looked at the level for another minute and then said, without smiling, you should throw that away. And then he handed it back to me, which felt like a mixed message.
The customer at that job is a nice fellow from the Cities who has been reading about post-frame construction for six months and now knows more terminology than I do. He walked up while we were passing the level around and asked what we were doing. I said, Tim, I bought a bad level at an auction. He nodded thoughtfully and said, that is a metaphor for something.
I have been trying to figure out what all week and I have not landed it yet. I will report back.
The thing about a half-right level is that it is worse than a completely broken level. A completely broken level, you look at it, you say nope, and you set it aside. A half-right level tricks you. It shows up in your hand at the right moment, looks correct, gives you an answer you like, and then eight months later a homeowner calls asking why their kitchen island is telling them the mail from Sears is important. That is a level that has failed the covenant of levels.
I put it up on a nail in the corner of the shop with a piece of masking tape on it that says NOT A LEVEL. My youngest grandson visited on Sunday and stared at it for a long time and said, Grandpa, why do you have a level that is not a level. I said, buddy, you are asking the right questions. He is going to do fine in life.
The auction did have some wins. I got a good pipe wrench for a song, a working truck battery someone had inexplicably included with a lot of chicken feeders, and a coffee thermos with the paint worn off in exactly the shape of a hand, which means it belonged to somebody good and it is now doing the same job for me. Not everything at an auction turns on you. Just the level.
Moral of the story, I guess, is that some tools lie. Most of them do it because they are old and tired. A few do it because they were born crooked and never got straightened out. Either way, you learn to trust the ones that have earned it and check twice on the ones that have not.
If you are building a pole barn or a barndominium out here in Kanabec or Pine or Aitkin county and something feels off about the walls, do not just trust the level. Trust two levels. Trust three levels. Trust a plumb bob and a laser and your own two eyes. And if any of those disagree, the level is probably the liar. The plumb bob has never let me down. Plumb bobs have integrity.
Come stop by Sherman or holler at us if you need a hand thinking through a build. Bring your own level. I will supply the coffee. If the coffee tastes off, that is on the thermos, not on me.
