{"id":40706,"date":"2023-01-03T12:27:53","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T19:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=40706"},"modified":"2023-01-03T12:28:15","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T19:28:15","slug":"making-your-own-steel-boxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/making-your-own-steel-boxes\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Your Own Steel Boxes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gareth\u2019s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales is published by Cool Tools Lab. To receive the newsletter a week early, sign up\u00a0here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happy New Year to you all and thanks so much for your tremendous support and good will throughout the year. It means a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making Your Own Steel Boxes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Metal boxes are so handy in the workshop. Image how cool it would be to make your own at whatever sizes you desire. In\u00a0this Pask Makes video<\/a>, he fashions metal boxes using a jig that he made. No special bending equipment required. To seal them up, you do need to weld, although, as he points out, you could easily make corner brackets and simply rivet them together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask Gar: Cutting Sheet Metal<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Reader\u00a0Martin<\/strong>\u00a0asks me:

I\u2019m interested in lightweight sheet metal cutting.\u00a0I have tin snips but they have their limits.\u00a0I know about pneumatic cutters but that\u2019s overkill for my application. I\u2019ve recently seen advertisements for something that connects to a power drill to cut sheet metal.\u00a0Do you know about these?<\/em>

There\u2019s a reason\u00a0This Old Tony<\/a>\u00a0refers to tin\/aviation snips as \u201chand cramps.\u201d The device you\u2019re talking about is something like the\u00a0Turbo Shear<\/a>. I have no experience with this tool, but I\u2019ve seen lots of video of it in action, and it looks useful if you have a lot of sheet to cut. If other readers have used this drill-attachment shear, please\u00a0chime in<\/a>.

There are many other options.\u00a0This Farmer Tyler video<\/a>\u00a0shows three: A plasma cutter (which would be overkill for light material), an angle grinder, and a jigsaw (with a metal-cutting blade). You can also use a\u00a0reciprocating saw<\/a>\u00a0with a metal blade. Then there are\u00a0manual nibblers<\/a>\u00a0(for light-gauge metal).

BTW:\u00a0Ron Covell\u00a0<\/strong>has a great video on how to properly use\u00a0aviation snips<\/a>\u00a0(which would make somewhat easier work than straight-pattern tin snips).

Shop Safety Basics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Woodworker and YouTuber,\u00a0Steve Ramsey<\/strong>, offers a really great guide to shop safety basics\u00a0in this video<\/a>. Amongst the common advice about wearing eye, hearing, and breathing protection, and ensuring adequate ventilation, he presents some great \u201cmeta\u201d safety advice. While these tips are directed at woodworkers, most of them apply to all types of shop safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* If an operation doesn\u2019t feel right in your gut, it\u2019s probably not. Think it through carefully. Consult the manual that came with the tool. Do a Google\/YouTube search. Practice it with the machine turned off.

* Understand what the tool is actually doing; how it works. This goes a long way toward understanding what might do wrong and how to react if it does.

* Bad shop lighting, bad. The better you can see what you\u2019re doing, the better the chances of doing it safely.

* Always keep your cellphone handy, in case of an accident.

* Be careful when doing repetitive tasks or tasks that you\u2019ve done hundreds of time before. Lack of focus and complacency are dangerous. It can be helpful just to remind yourself before doing something repetitive that you\u2019re about to do something repetitive and are therefore at higher risk of injury.

* And, one of the all-time best pieces of advice (what I call \u201cThe Kenny Rogers Rule\u201d), knowing when something is not working and when it\u2019s time to take a break, take a walk, grab a snack, etc. (Sayeth Kenny: \u201cYou got to know when to hold \u2018em, know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away and know when to run.\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TOYS! Enamel Shop Trays<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I recently \u201cborrowed\u201d\u00a0an enamel tray<\/a>\u00a0from my wife\u2019s art studio and I\u2019m not giving it back (sorry, hon). I\u2019ve been using it for things like parts cleaning and de-rusting. Above are two combination squares I was recently given. They were extremely rusty, but not so after a few\u00a0Evapo-Rust<\/a>\u00a0soaks and\u00a0wire-brush<\/a>\u00a0treatments in the tray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Duh Dept: Don’t Put Your Trash Cans Over the Edges of Your Worktable<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It should go without saying, but I\u2019ve made this mistake myself, lost items, and suspect they got knocked into the trash (I blame the cat). Put your cans well under your work surfaces or well away from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Systems Are Not Panaceas<\/strong>

I can\u2019t find the video any more, but there\u2019s a funny moment in an\u00a0Adam Savage<\/strong>\u00a0video from this year where he goes to apply one of his own shop rules and fails, on camera. The rule (which I\u2019ve published several times) is about storing unique\/specialty items that don\u2019t have an obvious home. The idea is to go with the very first place that springs to mind when you think \u201cWhere should I store this tool?\u201d It\u2019s a great idea (\u2018cause that first thought is likely to come to mind when you need the item again). But it doesn\u2019t always work, as Adam goes to find a special tool and can\u2019t remember what his first storage thought was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cyberneticist\u00a0Gregory Bateson<\/strong>\u00a0famously said: \u201cAlways tie your ideas with slipknots.\u201d Work systems are ideas that should be similarly tied. It\u2019s great to think through the systems of your shop, tweak your workflow, and apply the wise thinking of others (e.g. Savage\u2019s\u00a0First Order Retrievability<\/a>), but don\u2019t kid yourself that these ideas will apply 100% of the time or in all situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maker Slang<\/strong>

Technical terms, jargon, and slang from the realms of making.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chase –\u00a0<\/strong>In construction, a channel inside the walls of a building or a conduit outside of it used to protect and deliver wiring and pipes for plumbing, electrical, and other services.

Nadiral shading<\/strong>\u00a0– Dark shading of an object from the bottom up. The opposite of zenithal shading, which is the light-shading of an object from the top down. Both techniques are used a lot in miniature painting.

Premature sheen<\/strong>\u00a0– Term used by architect\u00a0Rem Koolhaus<\/strong>\u00a0to describe his fear that new technologies often make things look slicker, better designed, and more well thought out than they really are.

Toothing up<\/strong>\u00a0– (or \u201ctoothing\u201d) \u2013 Roughing up a surface to add texture\/bite so that a paint or other finish will have more material to grab on to.

Notable Quotables<\/strong>

\u201cYou can never have enough woodworkers telling you you can never have enough clamps\u201d \u2013 Dave Picciuto<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #142<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[2371],"tags":[2372],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40706"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40706"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40713,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40706\/revisions\/40713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}