Category: Oddities

While extricating the sawhorses from the garage, one of the bright yellow cap strips fell off. Whether by coincidence or not, it was the same one I’d previously repaired after sawing completely through the poor thing, but this time the failure came from what’s called inherent vice in the molded bracket-and-pin feature that holds the cap in place:

I filed a flat on the top of the bracket, drilled a 4-40 clearance hole, and then held everything in place while drilling a 4-40 tapping hole into the sawhorse. There was just enough plastic to make all that work, at least for the not very strenuous conditions it should experience around here:

While trying to reassemble the cap, I discovered why the bracket broke. The yellow cap has a bulkhead with an opening for the pin, plus a solid bulkhead that butts against the hinge along the top of the sawhorse. The bulkheads lie too close together: you simply cannot get the opening over the pin on this end with the cap parallel to the top of the sawhorse, which you must do in order to get the pin in the corresponding hole on that end.

Evidently they had the same problem at the factory and “solved” it by melting the bulkhead with a hot blade:

That didn’t really help me, but I carved off a few more slices to weaken the solid bulkhead enough to bend it around the hinge. I think the strain involved in the original assembly, plus what happened when I had to take it apart to fix the sawed-off end, weakened the bracket enough to snap off at some point over the winter.