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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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.
Now in its fourth revision, this remains the best guide for learning how to draw. I used it with my son, and his progress was remarkable. It has also helped my own drawing skills. I actually looked forward to the exercises which are brilliant and fun. In order to draw you must learn to see, and that’s what this book teaches: how to perceive. Because this perception training relies on strengthening right brain activity, it can be transferred to any kind of creative work. In each edition over the past 30 years, the author has widened the skills she is teaching, so that this current version will improve your perception skills — essential for any kind of innovation — whether or not you ever sketch. And still, it remains the best teacher for anyone — yes, anyone! — learning to how to draw. — KK
A caution: as all of our students discover, sooner or later, the left hemisphere is the Great Saboteur of endeavors in art. When you draw, it will be set aside--left out of the game. Therefore, it will find endless reasons for you not to draw: you need to go to the market, balance your checkbook, phone your mother, plan your vacation, or do that work you brought home from the office.
What is the strategy to combat that? The same strategy. Present your brain with a job that your left hemisphere will turn down. Copy an upside-down photograph, regard a negative space and draw it, or simply start drawing. Jogging, meditation, games, music, cooking, gardening--countless activities also produce a cognitive shift. The left hemisphere will drop out, again tricked out of its dominance. And oddly, given the great power and force of the left hemisphere, it can be tricked over and over with the same tricks.
Drawing is a curious process, so intertwined with seeing the that the two can hardly be separated. The ability to draw depends on one’s ability to see the way an artist sees. This kind of seeing, for most people, requires teaching, because the artist’s way of seeing is very specific and very different from the ways we ordinarily use vision to navigate our lives.
Because of this unusual requirement, teaching someone to draw has some special problems. It is very much like teaching someone to ride a bicycle: both skills are difficult to explain in words.
Drawing as a learning, teachable skill
I firmly believe that given good instruction, drawing is a skill that can be learned by every normal person with average eyesight and average hand-eye coordination. Someone with sufficient ability, for example, to sign a receipt or to type out an e-mail or text message can learn to draw.
These pre-existing skills have nothing to do with potential to draw well. What the pre-instructions drawings represent is the age at which the person last drew, often coinciding with the age at which the person gave up trying to draw.
To draw the Picasso upside down, move from line to adjacent line, space to adjacent shape and work your way through the drawing.
Ideally (in my view), learning in art should proceed as follows: the perception of edges (line) leads to the perception of shapes (negative spaces and positive shapes), drawn in correct proportion and perspective (sighting). These skills lead to the perception of values (light logic), which leads to the perception of colors as values, which leads to painting.
The iconic battery-powered Panasonic KP-4A, my previous favorite pencil sharpener, is no longer sold in the US. As it happens, I had been growing increasingly disenchanted by the noise and poor job the device sometimes provides. So I started researching to see what was out there in the manual small sharpener space. After ordering about six different models, I settled on the KUM Long Point Pencil Sharpener.
It’s different than other sharpeners in two respects. First, it has two holes: #1, labeled as such, trims the wooden barrel, and #2 hones the point. It also has an automatic brake built-in so you don’t waste time and lead after you’ve achieved a perfect point. Besides being silent and great fun to use, it produces a fantastically good point. There’s also a nice clear lift-up lid to easily empty shavings.
the Alvin Lead Pointer is the best way to keep this type of pencil sharpened. I am an architect and use these pencils every day. I’ve had this sharpener for more than ten years and it still works like new. The pointer is small, making it ideal to hold in your hand while rotating your lead holder around the pointer. Because your two hands are working together, I find I have more control and there are much fewer broken leads. The cutting head is sharp and lasts for a long time. It only takes a couple spins and your lead is needle sharp. Maintenance and clean-up is a snap. Take the top off the body and dump the graphite shavings into your trash and you are done If you do break your lead in the pointer, just remove the top and tap it on the inside edge of your trash can to clear the broken pieces. Lead pointers can be messy because of the fine graphite dust, but my pointer has never leaked the dust onto my desk. I have used many different types of pointers from desk mounted to ones mounted on the top of an electric eraser. The desk mounted pointers tend to break leads easily, since you are moving your lead holder in a circular motion around a pointer fixed to your desk, thus you may move in a direction that is not compatible to the pointer and will snap your lead. The electric eraser type is good, but it does not stay sharp for very long. It’s also difficult to empty the graphite shavings and jams when you break your lead inside it. This pointer really is the best way to keep you lead sharp! If you work in an office, you may want to buy two — because it is so small and useful, your pointer just might grow legs. — Donald Moore, Jr.
Mars plastic erasers are the best. Abrasive erasers tear up the paper surface too much, and unless you have mastered pressing really hard without breaking the lead a mechanical pencil doesn’t draw that deep anyway.
The plastic erasers can also be cleaned with a wet thumb or a rub on scrap paper for neat work. I always find the “gritty” or “gummy” erasers get so dirty you spend half your time rubbing out their own mess. The Mars compound is stiff enough that corners can be used for fine work, or large areas erased with the flat end. The dirty, used portions just roll off as you use it and are cleanly blown/swiped away. I like the idea of putty/moldable erasers, but they get filthy, crumbly and horrible if kept in a pocket or bag. — Alan
Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.
