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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Project I’m working on:How Hobbies Change Lives [For over 20 years, I've been fascinated by people who do wonderfully unexpected things in their free time. The deeper I go, the more convinced I become that hobbies, taken seriously, are one of the most underrated forces shaping our lives. And, hey, if you have one (the weirder, the better), I'd love to hear about it!]
PHYSICAL
Piper Warrior plane canvas created froma photo I took: Aviation has a strange way of simplifying life. Up there, excuses disappear, priorities become obvious, and physics remains wonderfully indifferent to your feelings. This canvas, which graces my office wall, reminds me daily that perspective changes everything. Sometimes the solution is not to work harder on a problem, but to gain a little altitude.
Mini Pelican Pin:multicolor and very cheerful, the best companion for any blazer. It was love at first sight. Bold, slightly ridiculous, and impossible to take too seriously, this pin has it all. The wiser I become, the more convinced I become that professionalism and playfulness go hand in hand. Some days a mini pelican on a blazer does more for my motivation than an entire productivity system.
Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés: This is one of those books people recommend for years before you finally pick it up and wonder why you waited so long. Thankfully, it found me in my twenties. It is part mythology, part psychology, and part permission slip to trust your instincts more and more and more. And hey, despite the first word in the title, it works remarkably well for all genders.
DIGITAL
TED talk "How Cities Come to Life": It has always amazed me how many people think cities happen by accident. They never do. Every city is a constellation of decisions made by people, for people, or, well, against people. I’ll be honest: I did not want to give this talk. But I eventually realized I couldn’t not give it, especially considering how the pain of poorly designed cities entered my own life. So I went all in and explored why cities shape far more than skylines, what becomes possible when we design them intentionally, and how they can teach us to live better. It still amazes me that I actually did it, so yes, it’s very much in my NOW.
Dear Derek’s new website: I love Derek Sivers’ ability to make complex ideas feel simple. His new website is a reminder that the internet doesn’t have to be noisy, addictive, or poisonous. It can still be thoughtful, personal, and useful. Way back when, he inspired me to make my own website as simple as they make them. Maybe he’ll inspire you, too.
INVISIBLE
Genius is the opposite of expectation.
I wrote this one down at least twelve years ago and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. We tend to associate genius with intelligence, talent, credentials, or achievement. Increasingly, I suspect genius is the ability to see what everyone else overlooks because they are busy looking where they were told to look. It hit me when I realized that some of the most interesting people I know are also the least constrained by expectation.
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