{"id":41746,"date":"2024-01-02T17:31:02","date_gmt":"2024-01-03T00:31:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=41746"},"modified":"2024-01-02T17:31:07","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T00:31:07","slug":"gars-tips-tools-issue-171","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/gars-tips-tools-issue-171\/","title":{"rendered":"Gar’s Tips & Tools – Issue #171"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gar\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

Ten Favorite Homely Tips and Tools<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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Usually, at the end of the year, I do a round-up of my ten (or so) favorite newsletter entries from the past year. This year, I decided to do something different. This is a collection of ten \u201chomely\u201d tips and tools that I use every day \u2014 they are quiet, plain, and unassuming. I think of these as \u201chomely\u201d in both the American sense of \u201cplain,\u201d and the British sense of \u201csimple, yet comfortable.\u201d

These are tips and tools I use nearly every day and rarely think about. I have backgrounded them. They\u2019ve become part of the everyday fabric of my work and home life.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Plastic Razor Blades<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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A few years ago, I learned about plastic razor blades<\/a> from Donald Bell\u2019s Maker Update<\/a> (and have written about them several times since). I\u2019m hooked! This video<\/a> shows a few of the things that they\u2019re useful for. It\u2019s a little misleading to say that they\u2019re better than metal razors. They can\u2019t cut, they just scrape. A reader also wrote in to suggest using a conventional razor blade scraper handle<\/a>. It is true that the blades sometimes come out of the cheap plastic handles the blades come with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alignment Dots on Electronics<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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For years, I saw other people, like my pal Kent Barnes<\/strong>, recommending alignment dots for mindlessly mating a jack to a plug without having to align the exact location or figure out the plug orientation. I finally broke down and did this for all of my gear, and man do I feel foolish for waiting so long. I used my FastCap Pattern Marker<\/a> to make the dots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t Stack Things on Top of Other Things<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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