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"We need a doorbell out back by the door, Al." Hey Hercules, lift this guy up and then clean out these stables. It sounded so simple. I had an electric drill, I had a drill bit, I had a chuck key, I had a pencil, I had six inches of industrial concrete wall that had been gaining strength for 20 years. Out goes the tool steel drill bit. You might just as well chuck up a hamster and try going though the wall, for all the good it would do.
If I as a scientist in a major corporation were called upon to go through a wall suitable for containing nuclear blasts, I would ask for a thermal lance. A thermal lance is a long length of iron pipe stuffed with steel wool and hooked to a trailer full of liquid oxygen. You pump in the LOX, light the end of the pipe with an automobile flare, and walk forward until you run out of wall or run out of lance. I would ask for a water jet cutter. A water jet cutter is a little jewel orifice set in a steel wand, and hooked to a hydraulic gizmo that sends out a stream of good old H-2-O squirting under about 100,000 psi near the speed of sound. Since I am paying for this out of my own pocket, I walk over to the hardware store and come back with a carbide masonry bit.
I chuck up the bit and attack the wall. Fifteen minutes later I am surrounded by a puddle of sweat, the bit is ruined, and a full quarter inch dimple has been made in the wall. Don't you just hate it when corruption, incompetence, and cheap construction are wasted on roads and skyscrapers and left out of industrial parks? I went back to the hardware store for a couple more carbide bits and two star drills. A star drill is a length of hardened steel that comes to a point, sort of. When gently smashed with a baby sledge hammer a few thousand times it gradually pulverizes its way through a cement block. Wang, thunk, clunk goes the star drill, powdering a millimeter of hardened concrete and aggregate. Zing, gronk goes the carbide bit as I lean into the wall, my face growing red with exertion as I contemplate the drill bit snapping and my lean but proud countenance being pulped by impact with a heavy duty electric drill gone insane.
I make pretty good time considering, an inch an hour. Two and a half hours into this exercise the carbide bit hits rebar. Scratch one drill bit.
Rebar is that ductile heavy steel bar with a rough surface put into concrete forms that must bear tensile stresses, binding the whole mess together and sullenly waiting for a chemist with a drill to try to get through. Back I go to the hardware store for a titanium nitride drill bit. "You lose!" I screamed at the rebar as the TiN monster devours the steel, spewing little grey shavings onto the ground. "You lose!" chuckled the concrete on the OTHER side of the rebar as it chews up the TiN drill bit.
This is why I bought two sets of carbide bits and star drills. Scientists know this stuff. Murphy always has the wind at his back.
As it was, as it was meant to be, the drill bit was just a little bit too short to get the job done. With less than a quarter inch of wall between me and my doorbell wire hole, I slipped the star drill into the dark passage and tapped it with the baby sledge, popping off a piece of the wall on the inside just smaller than a dinner plate. I went back to the hardware store for some spackle.
I ran the wires through the wall, screwed them into the doorbell push button, and noticed two little mounting holes along the edge of the brass rim. I immediately suspected that these holes were in some intimate one-to-one correspondence with the two brass screws left in the blisterpack, and were no doubt only lacking two holes in the wall in which to be fastened.
If you come down Red Hill Avenue in Costa Mesa, stop by that little company. Come round back and they will let you in the rear door. You cannot miss it. Their doorbell is the one glued to the cement wall.
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