[AT] Rechargerable battery powered tools

[Indiana Robinson]

	My closest neighbor is putting a good sized addition to 
his pole barn shop and I dropped over to supervise a 
while...   :-)
	Another neighbor who is not working at the moment was 
there helping him and as we chatted about battery tools he 
mentioned something I had not thought of. The place he had 
been working was in a commercial area in Indy near the 
Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There are some smallish pretty 
tough old residential clumps scattered through that area. 
Plenty of drugs, shootings, down on their luck alcoholics, 
fun stuff like that...   :-)   Lots of walled and fenced 
back business lots and factory lots.
	It seems that when several makers came out with with 
rechargable battery powered "saws-all" type saws that the 
burglary rate in those areas absolutely went through the 
roof... In a few cases literally... A chained and padlocked 
gate is no match at all for those saws. Neither is an out 
of site section of fence or wall. In some cases someone up 
on a roof out of sight could zip into a steel roof in 
seconds. Lots of the newer business buildings are almost 
all steel.
	Such methods have always been available to more 
accomplished crooks but now it is within easy reach of what 
would normally be petty thieves. They can buy the saw for 
about $100 (or steal one) and be in business with the big 
boys... Many of these burglaries are the type of thing 
where over a thousand dollars in damage is done to a 
building just to steal a tiny amount of petty cash that is 
on site to go buy some booze. A little like when they used 
to pour salt water in our outdoor Coke machine to get it to 
occasionally kick out about $2 worth of nickles... It 
caused hundreds of dollars of damage but only rarely kicked 
out the nickles. Of course vandals liked to just knock it 
over on its face. Also caused a lot of damage. I tried 
fastening it back to the wall of the building but they just 
hooked on to it with a chain around it and pulled it over 
with a car. Talk about costly damage...
	A nice fellow I used to know moved the small factory 
(Universal Manufacturing) he had bought out, to a location 
not far from the farm here, from that west side Indy area. 
He was having so many break-ins that it was breaking him. 
That was before the battery powered tools. He had told me 
that he was averaging some kind of break-in or attempt once 
a week. Mostly guys looking for easy booze or drug money, 
not a big score. He basically could not buy insurance 
there.
	He was making the three wheel McLean riding lawn mowers.



-- 
"farmer"
Hewick Midwest

The master in the art of living makes little distinction 
between his 
work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and 
his body, 
his information and his recreation, his love and his 
religion. He 
hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision 
of 
excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide 
whether he 
is working or playing. To him he's always doing both. 
 ~ James A. Michener, attributed

Francis Robinson
Central Indiana USA
robinson at svs.net