Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales is published by Cool Tools Lab. To receive the newsletter a week early, sign up here.
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!”
Become a Patron!Support our reviews, videos, and podcasts on Patreon!
Cool tools really work.
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 White Rose (1929) is a novel by B. Traven, the mysterious author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. An American oil tycoon wants a Mexican family’s hacienda because it sits on an ocean of oil, and the owner won’t sell at any price. It hasn’t been in English print for decades, so I made a new translation from the German.
This is the fourth Deep Cut Book Club Edition. Paying subscribers can download the free ebook using the button at the bottom of this issue.
About The White Rose
The novel moves back and forth between Jacinto Yáñez, a farm owner in Mexico, and Chaney Collins, the president of an American oil company who wants Yáñez’s property because it sits on an underground ocean of oil. Yáñez refuses to sell, even for millions of dollars. The hacienda is called the Rosa Blanca, and it has been passed down to him through a long line of ancestors. He feels he has no right to sell the land, and he believes the farm is worth more than any amount of money the oil company could offer. It is literally priceless. Yáñez feels responsible for the many interrelated families who live on the hacienda and make a living growing crops and raising livestock. He thinks it’s ludicrous to trade a food-producing homestead for a sack of gold coins.
Collins is enormously rich but spends a fortune on four mistresses, and he thinks Yáñez is just holding out for a higher price. When Yáñez keeps refusing to sell, Collins sends one of his henchmen to Mexico to bring Yáñez to San Francisco, where Collins believes he’ll have a better chance of making him see why he ought to take the deal. I won’t spoil what happens next.
Collins is widely considered a stand-in for the oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, who in 1921 sent $100,000 in cash to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, in what became the Teapot Dome scandal. Doheny’s son delivered it in a black bag. (That’s about $1.8 million in today’s money.) Fall then leased Doheny the Elk Hills naval oil reserve in California without competitive bidding. Fall went to prison for taking the bribe. Doheny was acquitted of paying it.
Who was B. Traven?
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of my favorite novels, and John Huston’s 1948 movie, starring Humphrey Bogart, won three Academy Awards. A few years after reading it, I read Traven’s The Death Ship (1926), about an American sailor who loses his ship and his papers in Antwerp and gets deported from one country to the next until he ends up shoveling coal on a rotting smuggling ship. After that, I wanted to know who Traven was. The more I tried to find out, the more confused I became.
He used multiple pseudonyms, including Hal Croves, Traven Torsvan, and Ret Marut. Most Travenophiles agree that he was a German actor and anarchist who fled Germany in 1919 after he was accused of helping establish the Bavarian Soviet Republic and threatened with execution. When British police questioned him in 1923, he said he was Hermann Otto Albert Maximilian Feige. When Huston tried to meet him before filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven showed up claiming to be Traven’s agent, a man named Hal Croves, and worked on the set as a consultant.
Traven didn’t think his identity should matter to anyone. “The creative person should have no other biography than his works,” he said.
The Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón made the novel into a film, Rosa Blanca, in 1961. The Mexican government decided its oil politics were too touchy and kept it out of theaters for eleven years. It wasn’t released until 1972.
About this translation
The White Rose wasn’t translated into English until 1979, 50 years after it was first published in Germany. Cedric Belfrage's translation is now out of print. I found a copy of the German edition at Project Gutenberg, and as an experiment I used Claude to translate it into English. I told it to stay close to the German and avoid smoothing it into idiomatic English, and to build a glossary so the names stayed consistent. I was surprised by how well it did the translation. It’s a hell of a good read.
Download the Book Freak Edition
This is the fourth book in the Deep Cuts Reading Club, a benefit for paid subscribers. Every month, I take an interesting and obscure public-domain book and turn it into an ebook in EPUB and PDF formats, with a short introduction.
You can access a copy ofThe White Rosebelow.
If you’re reading this as a free subscriber, the club is part of a paid subscription ($5/month or $45/year). Join the club here. And if money is tight, email me at editor@cool-tools.org, and I’ll comp you...
The tin man in dire need of maintenance.
