Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales is published by Cool Tools Lab. To receive the newsletter a week early, sign up here.
Every time a newsletter goes out, I get wonderful emails from readers telling me how much they enjoy it. At the same time, I get a spate of unsubscribes. Often, the subs go up by the same number they go down. It’s frustrating. Because of the positive emails, I know there’s an audience for what I’m doing here. Can you help me reach more of it? Can you post a link to this newsletter in your social media? Share with other maker enthusiasts? Thanks so much for your help.
Let’s Talk About Clamps
In this “Ask Adam Savage” segment on Tested, Adam is asked about shop clamps. This leads to a typically-Adam thoughtful and wise deep dive into the many uses and types of clamps: c-clamps, bar clamps, vice grips, quick-grip clamps, welding clamps, jeweler’s clamp, bench vises, lever clamps, kant twist clamps, and last but not least, spring clamps. One great tip takeaway: Don’t ever buy one clamp. Buy at least two, and if you can afford it, but 4 or more.
I subscribe to FineScale Modeler magazine, even though I’m not really a scale modeler. I was as a teen and still like looking at what people are up to in that hobby. Mainly, I look for modeling tips that I can apply to my hobby of miniature painting and tabletop game modeling. Here’s a great case in point. You can use a scribbing compass to cut circles in styrene. You just have to be patient, make multiple passes, and finish up with a hobby knife if the piece is thick or stubborn.
A Collection of Razor Rules of Thumb
A “razor” is a rule of thumb that simplifies decision making. Here’s a collection of the sharpest razors gathered by Sahil Bloom and posted on Twitter.
The Feynman Razor Complexity and jargon are used to mask a lack of deep understanding. If you can’t explain it to a 5-year-old, you don’t really understand it. If someone uses a lot of complexity and jargon to explain something, they probably don’t understand it.
The Luck Razor When choosing between two paths, choose the path that has a larger luck surface area. Your actions put you in a position where luck is more likely to strike. It’s hard to get lucky watching TV at home—it’s easy to get lucky when you’re engaging and learning.
New Column: Ask Gar
If you have questions about tools, things you might have read here in the past, resources you’re in search of, email me.
Reader Rick Griggs asks: “I need to buy headmounted lighted magnifying glasses. I don’t know what to look for, and thought you’d reviewed (or linked to a review) of these in a distant past newsletter that I could read/watch to learn more, but I can’t find anything. If you have done this, please point me to which one.”
Hey Rick,
I’m not sure it was in the newsletter. I know I talked about these in my old tips column on Make:. The one I have is shown above. It costs under $10 on Amazon! For my purposes (miniature painting), it’s great. It has two lenses that offer 1.5X magnification each and a third monocle lens at 7X magnification, providing intensities at multiples of 1.5, 3, 8.5, and 10. The light angle is adjustable in two directions and the light pack can even be removed from the headband for use elsewhere. A lot of features for under ten bones!
***
My old pal, Steven Roberts, asks about racks to hold Stanley organizing cases:
“Do you know of any quick-turn kits/products to handles stacks of Stanleys? Of course the solution is obvious, but I have so many projects that I don’t want to do it. If someone has made one, or published a good repurposing of something like a bakers rack or other off-the-shelf (heh, so to speak) tool, I’m all ears!
”If you have responses to questioned asked by readers here, let me know.
Regarding the term Minimal Viable Product (MVP). It was coined by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup as a way of learning what potential customers found valuable before spending a lot of time and money building something that people didn’t want to buy. Unfortunately, I think Reis did not do a very good job of naming this because it really doesn’t mean a stripped down product. In his world, it refers to anything that you can quickly learn from. Some examples could be a fake landing page which actually does nothing but gather insight about whether customers click on the link or not. I know of a company that used wire frames drawn on paper as an MVP to learn what people would pay for. Yes, it can be a stripped down version of an actual product, but in most cases, if you’re doing that before you’ve learned what people want to pay for, it’s overkill.
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This is an elegantly designed guide to managing independent magazines (the one with the largest circulation is probably Monocle). So You Want to Publish a Magazine? showcases the creativity of small publishers through interviews and plenty of images. It also provides practical tips on aspects like distribution, layout, and how to build a strong base of writers. (The most common piece of advice seems to be some version of “Prepare to lose money and sleep, so only do this if you’re completely committed.”)
It’s interesting and inspiring to gain access to this community of people who believe passionately that print’s not dead.
– Christine Ro
A SMART, VISUALLY-ENGAGING CRASH COURSE IN MAKING AND SELLING WHAT YOU MAKE
The Total Inventors Manual: Transform Your Idea into a Top-Selling Product by Sean Michael Ragan Weldon Owen 2017, 248 pages, 7.5 x 1.0 x 9.5 inches, Paperback
In my time in the trenches of the maker movement, I’ve gotten a chance to work with some truly extraordinary people. One of these is Sean Michael Ragan, author of this latest in Popular Science’s series of books targeted at maker/tinkerer-types. Sean’s writing on the maker movement and his numerous online tech projects have always revealed a unique and bright thinker– part scientist, part engineer, part artist — who isn’t afraid to think and create outside the box.
The Total Inventors Manual collects a lot of the diverse thoughts and ah-has inside of Sean’s brain and expands upon them. What you end up with is a surprisingly immersive course in designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and selling your next big idea. In under-250-pages, Sean manages to cram in an impressive, and impressively useful, amount of information and food for thought. The book is extremely chewy, beautifully and heavily illustrated, with lots of sidebars, inventor profiles, charts, exercises, and Q&As. It’s a great book for grazing, one that rewards poking your snoot into at just about any point.
Declaring anything “total” is setting oneself up for comments of wanting, but The Total Inventors Manual is at least impressively thorough when it comes to covering the top-level need-to-know for each discipline needed for going “maker pro” (designing, prototyping, arranging manufacture, basic business skills, fulfillment, shipping). The basics of all of these are covered, along with some useful specifics (e.g. how to laser-cut parts, manage a warehouse space, and create a product instruction manual).
As we all know, lots of deep education, free and on-demand, can be found on the Internet. What The Total Inventors Manual does a great job of is introducing you to what you need to know and why, in a smart, engaging, and digestible way. From there, you can begin getting your hands dirty quickly, educating yourself as you go by chasing deeper knowledge online as you need it.