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Comparing Circular Saw Blades
In this Project Farm video, Todd tests 15 different circular saw blades to find out which ones are the best. He tested blades for performance in ripping 2×4 lumber (before and after striking nails) and compared for performance while cutting through oak and ripping an 8’ pressure-treated 4×4. Bottom line? The Makita blade ($10) was best overall. The Spyder also performed surprisingly well for its $5 price tag (at time of testing), although that price is currently over $12 each, so look for it on sale. Doing a web search, I see it’s available at some e-tailers for under $7.
Cutlist Optimizer
Speaking of cutting things. If you have a woodworking project that involves a fairly complicated cut list, there is a free app called Cutlist Optimizer. It allows you to both organize your cut list to better keep track of all of your pieces and allows you to optimize the parts you can get from your sheet goods.
How to Calculate 555 Timer Frequency and Duration
Ah, the venerable 555 chip. One of the most useful and popular ICs in electronics history. Invented in 1971, released in 72, it remains a go-to solution for a myriad of timer, delay, pulse, and oscillation applications. In this Digi-Key video, they cover the steps for calculating the necessary resistor and capacitor values needed to achieve the frequency and signal duration that you’re after in your project.
The Power of Great Reference Books and Knowing the Names of Things
As both a maker and a word nerd (I edited Wired’s “Jargon Watch” column for 13 years), I’ve always tried to impress upon people the power in knowing what something is called. Knowing the proper name for something allows you to look it up, learn about it, track it down (if it’s a tangible object). In this Adam Savage video, he harps on the same thing. He does so while extolling the virtues of a book he recently discovered and loves, the Backstage Handbook. This visual technical reference is for stagecraft, but most of its contents–divided into tools, hardware, materials, shop math, electrics, and architecture–can be applied to all manner of making. You you get to learn the proper names for all of the tools, hardware, and materials it covers. Magic!
TOYS! StylusReach Flexible Flashlight
Cool Tools has launched a new newsletter called Tools for Possibilities. Every week, subscribers get sent a page from the CT book: Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. I was tickled to see that the first page I was sent had a review that I wrote on the StylusReach flashlight. The Cool Tools catalog was released in 2013. Nine years later and I still have, use, and love this flashlight. Good tools do that.
Newsletter reader Paco Hidalgo sent this in response to the piece in the last issue on water and baking soda as a CA glue accelerator.
“I first tried the Zip Kicker CA accelerator and found its smell very disagreeable, nauseating, and the spray bottle made it very difficult to apply just a small drop. I later leaned that cyanoacrylate glues “set” (polymerize) by the mere presence of trace amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere. This infographic explains.
“So, I concluded that if that is the case, then liquid water would certainly accelerate the polymerization. I found that just a drop of water from a toothpick or needle onto a blob of the glue does indeed accelerate the setting process. I never heard of using baking soda but that would add a foreign material to the bond. Why do that? [See comment below] There would be no reason to mix baking soda with water since water alone does a good job.
“BTW: A ‘secret’ that I learned from the guy at the counter of a mall hobby shop, is that CA glues will keep indefinitely in the freezer. I think the dry environment prevents the glue from polymerizing. The manufacturers don’t want you to know that so they tell you not to freeze their glues. I keep partial bottles of different types of CA glue, including LOCTITE, sealed inside a ziploc bag in the freezer that are at least 10 years old. I can take a bottle and use it immediately without waiting for it to come to room temp. It is liquid and works just as fast. I wipe the tip with acetone after each use and keep a common pin in the narrow opening so it doesn’t clog.
“I keep all my solvent glues, including Lexel, E6000, and Goop in the freezer too, with the same result. I think the cold environment keeps the solvent from evaporating and escaping from the imperfect seal that normally shortens the shelf life. I keep epoxy glues in the refrigerator. This is enough to prevent them from self-polymerizing.”
[Just to clarify: Baking soda is commonly used by itself as an accelerator, especially in the hobby/modeling communities. Besides being an accelerator, it adds more structure to the join. Large amounts of baking soda can be added to CA glue to create a very hard material. This soda and CA combo as a structural material is common among luthiers repairing bridges and fret boards. It can be sanded, drilled, etc.]
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A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.
Whether you’re a hiker, biker, backpacker, camper, naturalist or simply someone who’s ever been caught in the rain, you’ll treasure these classic all-weather notebooks. The cover is Polydura and the pages are made with a substrate, giving the paper a wax-y feel. The effect: water beads off them, meaning no pulpy mess and no bummer over any lost thoughts or data. They are not a new invention by any means. Back in the 1920s, they were developed for Pacific Northwest loggers. These days, the manufacturer makes both bound and spiral bound books in an impressive array of sizes and types (e.g birding!). I keep a pocket-size, 24-page, staple bound mini-book in the small pack I take cycling and hiking. In the event of a downpour, all my ah-ha moments are safe. If you plan to be in really harsh conditions and want to go the extra mile, you might try one of their all-weather pens. Note: I have not used them — a pencil or standard ballpoint does the trick for me. —Steven Leckart
Before I start a new painting, I usually draw what I want in Adobe Illustrator, and then transfer a printout of that drawing to canvas or board to paint. I’ve tried opaque projectors, but the image is faint (at least on the el-cheapo projector I use) and I don’t really have room to set it up. I’ve also tried using a piece of paper that I’ve rubbed pencil or charcoal on, but that produces a blurry line.
Like an idiot, it wasn’t until recently that I considered the possibility that there might be a transfer paper for artists. Of course, there is one. It’s called Saral Wax-Free Transfer Paper, and it works like a dream. It comes in five different colors, but I can get away with blue and white. It leaves a clear, thin line that erases easily and doesn’t mess up the color of the paint I use. I’m already hooked on it for life.
If you send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Saral, they’ll send you free samples in all five colors. — Mark Frauenfelder
Anyone doing technical or design work has burned through reams of graph paper. I’m a designer, and I use Whitelines to do technical drawings in accurate scale, which are then turned into 3-D models and die tooling diagrams. Whitelines is the best graph paper I have ever worked with.
The concept is simple and powerful. Ordinary graph paper is paper with a graph of lines printed on it in a light color, often blue or gray. Whitelines is paper with a very light gray grid of squares printed on it. The graph is unprinted, hence, white lines.
This is genius. Pen strokes, and even pencil, are startlingly clear against the background. The distracting visual noise of a printed graph is gone entirely, while retaining the precision and ability to see scale, which is graph paper’s reason for being.
I’ve been using Whitelines extensively for the past few months, mostly for technical drafting on the MakerBeam project, an open source metal building kit like Meccano for the Arduino set. The grid is 0.5 centimeter pitch, perfect for working on a metric standard. With ordinary graph paper, pencil lines are close in color weight to the lines themselves. When scanning pencil marks on ordinary graph paper, the pencil lines often vanish completely. With Whitelines, I can scan a pencil sketch, if I’m satisfied with it, without having to go back over it with pen.
Available in A4, A5 and pocket sizes, as tablets, spiral bound, perfect and hardbound, both lined and graph. Better graph paper makes better drawings, and this is genuinely better graph paper. — Sam Putman
OK, so I wanted to sit down and workout a grand plan for my new garden, so I figure a pencil and some graph paper is the way forward.
Just finding some simple 2mm graph paper with 1cm semi bold and 2 cm bold turned out to be a near impossible task. Then I discovered the Graph Paper PDF Generator at incompetech.com .
It does plain paper, lined paper, multi width, hexagonal, even semi-bisected trapezoid! All completely customizable. And it’s free! — Mark Coffey
Ever have an idea in the shower and have no way to record it…and then it’s lost forever? I use a “Dive Slate”, a small (~4″x6″ ) sheet of sturdy white plastic with a plain old fashioned golf pencil attached. They’re cheap (around $5-$8), available on the net at various dive shops, fit nicely behind the soap holder or hung in the shower and work well; they’re meant to be written on underwater by divers, so unless you shower under Niagara Falls, your thought will be captured until you erase it. — Vincent Crisci