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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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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.
The mid-1960s were an exciting time for art, music, youth culture, society, and politics, all of which were transforming at dizzying speed. The left wing underground press of the time reflected these mind-boggling changes in their design, content, and distribution methods. Underground newspapers from around the world joined the Underground Press Syndicate, sharing articles and illustrations free of copyright restrictions.
These papers gleefully taunted the establishment by promoting recreational drugs, recreational sex, black power, gay rights, women’s liberation, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-war activism. The covers of the papers were bold, experimental, and subversive. When I was designing bOING bOING (the late 1980s/early 1990s zine) I was inspired by the precious few samples of The East Village Other, The Realist, and The Gothic Blimp Works that I could find in used bookstores. I wish I’d had a copy of Free Press back then! Almost every page of this book has a full-color photo of a cover or interior page from dozens of well-known and obscure newspapers from the era. Though much of the design is amateurish and ugly, there are examples of brilliance, too, making this a worthy reference for designers.
– Mark Frauenfelder
BUILDING STORIES – CHRIS WARE’S MAGNUM OPUS INCLUDES 14 LAVISHLY PRESENTED STORIES IN DIFFERENT FORMATS, ALL IN ONE BOX
Building Stories by Chris Ware Pantheon 2012, 260 pages, 11.7 x 16.6 x 1.9 inches (hardcover, softcovers, boxed)
Chris Ware is renowned as the kind of comic artist who makes you expect more from the genre. For nearly three decades, his unfussy, formalized style has given birth to cult strips such as Rusty Brown and Quimby The MouseM. Despite his style being modeled after the simplicity of Tintin in order to express emotion in as universal a way as possible, his style is a vehicle for the minutiae of human struggle. Building Stories is no different.
Largely comprised of strips previously published in national newspapers, but also featuring unreleased material, Building Stories is Ware’s magnum opus – 14 lavishly presented stories in one beautifully designed box, itself adorned with extra strips and illustrations. The separation of the stories into physically distinct objects is intended to allow the reader to acquaint themselves with the characters in any order they choose.
Revolving around the lives of the inhabitants of an apartment block in Chicago, his pet themes of social alienation, excessive rumination and the pervasive feeling of being railroaded by mundanity are all present and correct. A number of archetypes populate the building – the lonely old lady, the bickering couple, the single young woman, but Ware imbues each with its own identity.
Arguably the most prominent character is the young woman who has a prosthetic leg, observed at various unassuming yet pivotal moments in her life, whether she’s summer house sitting, lying awake at night thinking of her newborn child, or trying to overcome her anxiety in a writing class. It is tough not to feel empathy for her directionless existence, constant anxieties over wasted potential and the recursive spikes of past trauma. A soap opera in the best sense, there is more than a touch of Charles M. Schulz about Ware’s existentially preoccupied, neurotic characters.
Ware also experiments with layout to sometimes dizzying effect. The effusive nature of Branford the Best Bee in the World is matched by spiraling circular panels, whereas our aforementioned heroine wearily lives out her life inside row after row of regulation size square panels.
The presentation of the strips in wildly differing formats makes this a true collector’s package – pamphlets, news sheets, hardback book, comic on a fold-up “game board,” and more. If you happen to be looking for the graphic novel’s answer to Ulysses, then look no further. If not, buy it anyway. You’ll believe a comic can do amazing things. – Nick Parton
The tin man in dire need of maintenance.
