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.
Darth Vader and Son is cute, and perfect for the little Star Wars fan in your life. It playfully posits the question “What if Darth Vader had actually raised Luke?” Author and illustrator Jeffrey Brown turns run-of-the-mill parenting activities into fun moments full of Star Wars references.
This book isn’t so much a story as it is a peek into the hypothetical everyday life of Vader and Luke. Every page of the book tells its own complete story of sorts. Some pages are miniature comics while others are full-page illustrations. Brown does an incredible job of telling his story in these single images. I imagine this book would be great for children just learning to read, similar to how the Owly books help develop a sense of story without the need for lines and lines of text. If you have a child that enjoys books but isn’t yet able to read longer children’s books with more words, Darth Vader and Son is a great compromise. At 64 pages it is long enough to be engaging for an extended period of time, but you can basically jump in and out of the book at any point.
Brown’s art style is colorful and light, reminiscent of childhood crayon drawings. Darth Vader always looks slightly goofy, which goes a long way to establish the tone of the book. The drawings include a number of visual references to the Star Wars films that will delight anyone with the eye to catch them (and there’s something on almost every page, so have fun looking for everything). Possibly the funniest parts are seeing Darth Vader engaged in totally mundane tasks like making breakfast or wrapping Luke’s birthday present. It’s a side to the character we’ve never had the opportunity to see, and Brown plays on the quirkiness perfectly. Overall, Darth Vader and Son is a fun read for adult Star Wars fans who like a good laugh, as well as for children just learning to love these characters. This book is actually the first in a series, so if you like it be sure to check out Vader’s Little Princess, Goodnight Darth Vader, and Darth Vader and Friends. – Alex Strine
WHITE HEAT 25 – A COOKBOOK ABOUT A SLEEP-DEPRIVED, NICOTINE-FUELED MAD MAN IN THE KITCHEN
White Heat 25 by Marco Pierre White (author) and Bob Carlos Clarke (photographer) Mitchell Beazley 2015, 192 pages, 9.9 x 12.5 x 0.8 inches
White Heat has long been my White Whale when searching through used bookstores. I’ve wanted this book for going on ten years. The first time I heard the name Marco Pierre White I had been reading a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, wondering if I had what it takes to be a professional chef (I did not). Bourdain mentioned White’s book, saying that it was the first time he’d seen a “real” chef in a cookbook, a sleep-deprived, nicotine-fueled, mad man in the kitchen.
I thought that I’d finally found my copy when there was a re-release a few years back, but that paperback copy is the TV dinner to this 25th anniversary edition’s three-course meal. Can a home cook use any of these recipes? Maybe. The recipes are French. They’re complicated. And the ingredients include things like caviar, lobster, and pig trotter. But, the mistake is to think of this as a straight-up cookbook. You wouldn’t flip through a book on Picasso and expect to learn how to paint. This book is evidence in the argument that food can be art.
While you might not find a recipe for something to cook on a Tuesday night, you will find: Beautiful, gritty, black and white photography that makes you feel like you’re in the kitchen with this lunatic. A chef doing what chefs do, smoke. The word “fuck” on more than one page. A fresh-faced Gordon Ramsey before he started calling people “donkeys.” And a handful of recipes for dishes that allowed White to become the youngest chef to hold three Michelin Stars. White Heat 25 is fitting for any bookshelf, coffee table, or kitchen counter. – JP LeRoux
Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair.Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.
