I did it!

This picture represents a few hours of worry and about 15 minutes of very hard scary work.
Greg was supposed to cut the lock off for some people that lost the key for the lock on their storage unit. He was supposed to be home at 3pm from his canoe trip with the scouts, but at 5:15pm when the people showed up for their lock-cut appointment he still wasn't home! I was worried about what I should do, and also about what was making him so late.

I decided to suck it up and try to do what I've seen him do. These locks are incredibly strong, so you can't just chop them off with the regular lock cutters. You have to get the grinder out and grind/melt the lock off. This requires power, and of course there's nowhere to plug the grinder in outside. So that means you have to get the converter box and the car and park in front of the unit. Then you clip the converter box on to the car battery while it's running, plug in the grinder to the converter box and grind away!

It's scary because it's really loud and shoots lots of sparks all over the place. I wore leather gloves and tried to keep my face far away, but at the same time tried to see what I was doing. After about 15 minutes of serious grinding the lock fell apart. It was very hot and I couldn't even hold it with my thick leather gloves. I just left it on the ground and kicked it up to the office so I could trash it.

I did it all by myself!

(When Greg got home at 7pm, he told me a tale of woe...they capsized their canoes, and it was cold and windy and they got sunburned even though it was a cloudy day...but everybody was ok!)