Reinventing the Wheel

There was this drain snake customer of ours, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who might have been the penultimate re-inventor of the wheel. There wasn't a drain snake which was safe from his passion to do things different under the guise of making them better, which to my knowledge he never actually managed. His improvements tended to make things harder rather than easier.

Ol' Cloyce had a large plate installed atop a snake to turn the motor a hundred and eighty degrees around because it would then magically give the machine more power. It didn't, but it sure made working on the motor a greater chore. 

He welded the power feed onto a machine, backwards too by the way, because that made it easier (he argued) to access the actuator handle. Not in the least, I tell you, but replacing bearings was then a true challenge because you had to take the entire feed apart to do it. Normally you take the unit off and set it on a work bench where, trust me, putting in new bearings was much more readily done. 

Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was retrofitting a thirteen horsepower gasoline engine to his electric drain machine because he was absolutely going to destroy any root bed in any sewer which came his way. Those roots would never know what hit them. 

There wasn't simply one thing wrong with that approach. There were many.

A typical electric snake has a 3/4 horsepower motor. Cloyce increased the power nearly twenty times the necessary strength. Overkill much, Cloyce?

Then the unit was too heavy and bulky to get into a standard basement in a private home. But that was probably just as well because, you know, toxic fumes from the exhaust just might be a problem in a small enclosed area. Maybe.

Professor Cloyce took care of that with an intricate series of detachable piping which could be run from an open basement window to the drain access. Of course, that put you as much as forty or fifty feet away from the job and left you blind to the work. I guess progress doesn't absolutely require that you see what you're doing, but still.

I'm sure he did rip those roots to shreds. I'm sure he destroyed a good many lengths of sewer pipe too. Ah well. Here's to Cloyce, the Thomas Edison of the snake world.

Or more honestly, the Rube Goldberg. But I'm sure the old boy had fun tinkering in his laboratory. Uh, garage.