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.
Become a Patron!Support our reviews, videos, and podcasts on Patreon!
Cool tools really work.
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.
The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique by Jeffrey Morgenthaler (author) and Alanna Hale (photographer) Chronicle Books 2014, 288 pages, 7 x 9.5 x 1 inches
As someone who spent many misguided years of my youth drinking poorly-eyeballed gin and tonics out of coffee mugs, I never really understood: How exactly can you make cocktails “well” or “poorly”? Isn’t it a simple matter of ratios – of pouring the right amount of the right things into a glass, chucking in an ice cube or two and calling it a day? Where is the mysterious opportunity in that simple process to either mess it up or do it exceptionally well? Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s The Bar Book is a masterclass on that very subject.
The Bar Book is not a recipe book. Instead, it is a techniques book. Morgenthaler elevates making cocktails into a craft, focusing on finding the right recipe, using the best ingredients, and executing it all using effective techniques. While the author does include expertly curated recipes for some must-know cocktails, instead of focusing on what to mix (which can always be found with a quick Google of “how to make a Cosmopolitan”), it focuses on how, why, and when to mix it. He gives you a 360-degree education in barcraft, from what shapes cocktail shakers come in and what the differences mean to why the shape and size of your ice is important and how to make it so that it comes out of the tray clear and beautiful. He’s a big proponent of making things like mixers, garnishes and even liqueurs from scratch, so the book offers up recipes for making things like flavored syrups, infusions, and even tonic water. Even if you’re not the type who relishes taking the time to create something you can easily buy from a store, seeing and understanding the DIY processes behind these ingredients is fascinating and demystifying.
The book is peppered with stories, some steeped in niche-y barcraft history and delightful tradition, some from Morgenthaler’s own bartending days. Striking, minimalist photography guides you from the easiest recipes to the most hardcore. A perfect blend of science, theory, philosophy, history, and personality, The Bar Book is a must-read material for anyone who wants a deeper look at what exactly it means to be a good bartender. – Michelle Kaatz
THE VERY PERSISTENT GAPPERS OF FRIP – CREEPY MULTI-EYED CREATURES TORMENT A VILLAGE
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders (author) and Lane Smith (illustrator) Random House 2015, 96 pages, 5.8 x 9.6 x 0.5 inches
Gappers are creepy little orange, multi-eyed, round creatures that love nothing more than to hang out on or near goats, shrieking all the while. As you might imagine, this is very stressful to the goats. They stop eating; they stop giving milk. If your family gets its livelihood from that milk, you’re in bad shape when the gappers are around. They emerge from the ocean, find the goats, and wreak their shrieking havoc.
The village of Frip is made up of three ocean-side shacks. The girl Capable and her widowed father live in one. Mrs. Romo and her sons live in the second. Sid and Carol Ronson and their daughters (who “sometimes stood completely motionless in order to look somewhat pretty”) lived in the third. In Frip, the children must check on the goats eight times per day in order to remove the gappers and return them to the sea (from which they will reemerge again and again).
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a fable about the perils of putting oneself before the community and the ultimate merits of sharing amongst a community. The gappers have bothered the three families’ goats equally for ages, until one of the smarter gappers realizes that Capable’s goats are slightly closer than the others. Once the gappers converge, Capable is unable to keep them away. She asks for help, but she is refused:
“We feel strongly that, once you rid your goats of gappers, as we have, you will feel better about yourself, and also, we will feel better about you. Not that we’re saying we’re better than you, necessarily, it’s just that, since gappers are bad, and since you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us.”
Capable is, in fact, quite capable – she takes care of those around her and solves problems for herself. The illustrations are lush and whimsical. The book is a lovely parable for children, but the tale and visuals are engaging for readers of any age. – Meagan Rodgers
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.
