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I got a phenomenal response to my request for input on this newsletter. Thanks to all who messaged me. Turns out, an overwhelming number of you like the newsletter the way it is and simply offered encouragement. I also got several excellent suggestions for new features which I’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks. Keep those cards and letters coming!
How to Restore Yellowed Clear Plastic
In this quick Tested video, Adam Savage sets out to restore the lid of a gorgeous vintage Nagra IV-S audio recorder he recently acquired. The machine is in surprisingly good condition, but the clear plastic cover was scratched and badly yellowed. Doing research, he found many recommendations for using 12% hydrogen peroxide. He tried it with partial success. He discovered that finishing it up with plastic polishing compound returned it to something close it is original glory.
Making a Cheap, Simple Air Cleaner for a Small Shop
In this I Build It video, John shows how he made a simple and inexpensive air cleaner for his small woodshop. The air cleaner was made from little more than a small fan, a piece of duct piping, some scrap ply, and a several shop vac air filters. I love the way it can be expanded (with additional filters) via a threaded rod that holds the filters in place.
IKEA Wrenches on Your Pegboard
I just discovered a use for all of those hex wrenches that come with IKEA and other flat-pack furniture. They make perfect pegboard pegs!
Oil Can!
The tin man in dire need of maintenance.
The other day, while oiling a squeaky hinge with some lithium grease, I flashed on my granddad. A consummate tinkerer and inventor, Gramps was obsessed with maintenance. He frequently had his spring-bottom oiler in hand, blue shop rag tangling from his back pocket, going around the house, the yard, his backyard workshop, the car, lovingly maintaining the machinery of his life. I decided in that moment to try and be better at doing the same. Moments later, on Twitter, I saw this Kurt Vonnegut quote: “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Exactly. OIL CAN!
Maker Slang
Slang, jargon, and technical terms for the realms of making things.
Crown pulley – A pulley designwhere the center has a larger diameter than the outer edges, thus a “crown.” Perhaps counter-intuitively, the belt on the pulley will always seek the area of highest tension, returning it to the crown. Via Maker Update.
Promptcrafting – In AI art, it’s all about the quality of the prompts you craft. The better your invocation, the better the magic that gets returned.
Rewilding your attention – Writer Clive Thompson has been promoting the creative benefits of exposing yourself to the novel, the offbeat, the serendipitous. Look beyond what the online algorithms feed you – rewild your attention!
Shop Talk
As stated in the intro, I received many fabulous emails from you, dear readers. Here is one from Paul Cryan. Look for some tips from Paul in a coming issue!
“Thanks for doing all you do. Your tip books [Ed: Vol 1, Vol 2.] are great and I’m really enjoying the newsletter. I bought and devoured both of your books, in Kindle and PDF formats. I refer to them often and having the search function (via either the Kindle app or iBooks, respectively) is really handy. Every few days, I find myself looking at objects in new ways and going back to your references. This past Friday, I didn’t have a clamp within getting-up-from-my-chair distance at my office desk, so I ended up using a pair of pliers and a rubber band to hold together a plastic part I was gluing. Thanks for putting that seed in my head.
“The only problem I have with the weekly newsletter is that it gives me way too many things to think about and try per unit of time!
“With your tips books, I’ve got months to read through them and try things out. This week, I experimented with the lanolin mineral oil mixture to rustproof tools out of your latest tips book and it seems to hold much more promise than Johnson’s Paste Wax for keeping my old restored Shopsmiths looking and working great. I still need to test whether the stickiness can be buffed sufficiently off the power-tool surfaces to avoid particles grabbing, but so far so good. And who doesn’t like that faint smell of ungulates on their metal? 😉
“With the newsletter, I’m interested in just about everything you cover, which leads me to a weekly frenzy of investigation and implementation. Within the past month I’ve upgraded our broken sink strainers to the OXO type (love them), picked up a Williams ratcheting screwdriver (my new favorite ‘good enough’ tool), and bought Fat Boy pencils and FastCap markers that have me wondering how I didn’t know about these things before. And now I’m browsing saw blades!”
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One of my most unforgettable travel experiences was visiting the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, near Prague. This small 19-century monastery chapel would be unremarkable, except that it is decorated with thousands of human bones and skulls. There are skull- and femur-decorated columns, hanging garlands of bones, a chandelier made of every bone in the human body, and a replica of the Schwarzenberg family coat of “arms” – that also includes leg, finger, scapula, and coccyx bones! The memory of that space makes any Halloween display seem tame and unimaginative.
If Kutná Hora isn’t in your travel plans, check out Memento Mori, a spectacular book of essays and photographs by UCLA PhD and art historian Paul Koudounaris. His 500 color photographs here are arresting, both in subject matter and photographic technique. The handsome hardbound book includes a stunning centerfold of a bejeweled and gold-encrusted mummy. The detail and visual opulence of the photo justifies the giant four-page spread. I enjoyed reading the informative essays about the use of human bones as a form of remembrance in cultures around the world, from Europe to Thailand, Japan to Peru, and from ancient times to the present day. Here’s just one fun fact: there are two venerated human skulls (ñatitas) enshrined in the homicide division of the national law enforcement agency in El Alto, Bolivia. These two cranium crime-stoppers have provided “clues to difficult cases and have been credited with helping to solve hundreds of crimes.” – Bob Knetzger
ATLAS OBSCURA – THE INTRIGUING WEBSITE OF LIFE ODDITIES MOVES TO ILLUSTRATED BOOK FORM
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton Workman Publishing Company 2016, 480 pages, 7 x 10.5 x 2.1 inches (hardcover)
It’s a big world we live in, full of fortune-telling fox-woman hybrids, libraries where books are chained to the shelves, rusting shipwrecks, and amusement parks at the bottom of salt mines. The website Atlas Obscura collects the most intriguing of them, and now Atlas Obscura is in book form, perfect for flipping through while waiting for water to boil. It’s plentifully illustrated, with photographs or drawings on every page.
This is not The Book of Lists, and it is not for young children. Many of the entries concern war or atrocities, and some photos are gruesome; the world is full of mummified limbs. The authors treat the subjects respectfully, and have done their research. The story of the Bicycle Tree in Washington State, for example, has both the glurgy and the factual versions.
Some entries are not location based, such as the two pages of entheogens from around the world, or the list of abandoned nuclear power plants. But most entries have the latitude and longitude for each attraction, and sometimes street addresses; you could use this as a guidebook for a particularly unconventional wanderjahr. – Sara Lorimer
Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair.Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.
The tin man in dire need of maintenance.
