Leaving Ciudad Mexico last week, with with my Alto Railboard as carry on. Believe it or not, security seized the truss wrench I had in the side pocket! Such a dangerous item! No one has ever even looked at it before, so I don’t know what to make of this. I guess I will have to make sure it’s checked in the future. Be warned!

Robert

Good to know, I'll be heading there for a wedding in early April and will plan accordingly. You never know what people will pull on you in a dark alley, one man's irreplaceable proprietary instrument truss wrench is another man's shank.

On a mostly unrelated note, I've long maintained that a Chapman Stick is the best of all possible instruments to have in either:

1. A bar fight
2. A zombie apocalypse.

It seems to me that a guitar or bass would be less wieldy given the size of the body. The Stick, a single and solid beam, can be swung with power and conviction. The belt hook makes a nice guard of sorts if you're swinging it from the base of the instrument.

Hard shell cases can be tossed at adversaries as a quick get-a-way resource or to stall for a moment of time while you fetch your instrument. Soft shell cases are mostly relegated to parrying blows or some more advanced choking techniques.

Stands could be disassembled and used like ninja weapons. Just the sheer shock and awe of that might be enough to disuade any potential attacker. Who wants their lung punctured on the head of an ultimate stand? NOT ME! So just having that show of force at the ready could save lives. Bonus: The wooden stand can be used as a one-time ranged weapon - maybe knocking them in the head or at least knocking their drink out of their hand.

Cables and cords seem out of scope for this discussion as then we'd need to include what it would take to disassemble a pedalboard (3-5 seconds) and pull out individual pedals to use as called shots to perpetrators heads OR used as a Cleric might, to inflict blunt concussive trauma. And then crushing blows with amps - this would definitely take some planning, but could be devastating when used in conjunction with some well placed 20 TS cables.

I'm going to go with a 10' TRS cable for this type of work as a TRS to dual TS is not going to be as stable (see most recent episode FHF 6 2023).

When it comes to the Truss wrench, I don't know if this even qualifies as a dagger in the boot type of 6-fingered man get-away weapon. There's no edges to it and it's too small to inflict any kind of blunt force. I suppose in a close quarters type of melee, it could provide some sort of eye-gouging options - but I mean, by that point, it's time to shine up the battle axe, go for the Stick itself and lay on Macduff.

Well, it DID occur to me at the time that the strings themselves seem more potentially deadly on a plane than a wrench. But we had better not being that up or there won’t be any more carry ons, will there?

It happened to me for a nail clipper. Now I put almost everything in my big luggage, the one who goes in the baggage hold

I have tied a piece of nice red string through the little hole in the end of my truss wrench. It looks nice, it makes it more visible and also enables it to be hung on a hook somewhere, should I feel like doing that.

But I guess it also makes it possible to swing the wrench at high speed overhead and hit somebody in the face with it. Maybe I should have the edges sharpened too. Dangerous stuff!