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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I knew I had a long flight back from Asia coming up this fall and didn’t want to face it in economy class. So last May I connected with MileMethod to get help with a strategy to earn enough frequent flyer miles to get back in lie-flat business class. Four credit card signup bonuses and 471,000 points later, we’ll now return in comfort all the way from Ho Chi Minh City to Mexico City via Seoul, then a quick hop in economy to my home in Guanajuato, Mexico. This $9,757 itinerary cost us $444 in taxes + 260,000 points. I doubt I could have pulled this off on my own, especially since it involved an Amex transfer bonus, a Chase transfer, and booking on an airline that wasn’t either one we’re flying with.
Zero to Travel Podcast
Since I travel so often, I don’t actually listen to many travel podcasts. The exception is the Zero To Travel Podcast hosted by Jason Moore. He always pulls the best travel and life lessons from his guests, whether it’s travel legends like Rick Steves and Samantha Brown or everyday people pursuing an unconventional life built around travel or living abroad. It highlights lesser-known destinations, travel trends that will save you time and money, and ideas to help you add more travel into your life. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or just search “Zero To Travel” in your preferred podcast app.
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Pack a Fan for Europe
You might not want to bring up this factoid at a family dinner in Germany, where only 6% of homes have air conditioning, but more people die from heat in Europe each year than from gun violence in the USA. This is partly because of global warming and partly due to historic cultural opposition to A/C—outside of Spain and Italy at least. The toll has been especially bad in France this year. Public Health France logged 8,973 deaths for the week of June 22, cautioning that the number was still only a partial count. The preliminary total was 6,948 deaths registered for the previous week of June 15 to June 21. Since then it has gotten even hotter. At least the Seine is clean enough to swim in now.
Nominate a Contemporary Wonder of the World
The World Travel and Tourism Council announced that it is starting the process to choose the 7 Contemporary Wonders of the World next year and nominations opened yesterday. This is meant to “identify and celebrate the landmarks and buildings created since 1801 that have had the greatest impact on Travel & Tourism, local communities and economic development, and continue to redefine the future of destinations around the world.” See more details and have your say here.
A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.
