• 1 Post
  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • Do you primarily use hand tools or power tools? Also, are you looking for a primary work bench, or an assembly bench?

    Hand tool benches, you want them to be really heavy and sturdy since they get loaded in shear a lot by things like planing and sawing. For a hand tool bench, you basically need to decide what you have to work with, and what your work style is like. I like go be able to just clamp stuff to my bench top, so a Nicholson bench is a little annoying for me. Also, think about the space you have available, and whether you are right or left handed. For handtool work, I would prefer a face vice and a tail vice, with plenty of dog holes.

    For power tools, the name of the game is modularity and mobility. Everything should be the same height and on wheels so you can move stuff around to act as infeed/outfeed tables. They don’t need to be as heavy or sturdy, so you can use some space under the bench for more efficient storage. It’s also nice to have a few ways to clamp other tools down.


  • The problem I have with that is the same problem I have with the way people talk about most colonizer-colonizee(?) relationships. In many cases, you don’t have the big bad powerful people going in and doing violence against natives. The powerful sit at home, and force their local poor into a position where they have to do violence in order to survive. Yeah, you had your Christopher Columbus types, but they weren’t/aren’t the majority.

    Odds are, those loggers are members of another local tribe, who have been economically forced into illegal logging. Logging is super dangerous, and there’s no way that the people actually responsible, who are the ones making real money off of it, are out there with chainsaws.

    Tl;dr, they need glocks and bus tickets





  • In addition to lots of good comments you have already received, I’ll add a couple notes.

    Some old tools were designed to let you do some inherently unsafe things. Radial arm saws are one thing that comes to mind. They were designed to be a one stop shop, but really compromised safety to do that. If you have one, do some reading or watch some videos of modern woodworkers on what you can actually safely do with them.

    Another thing to look out for is that old tools can sometimes have a lot of vibration. As things get older, bearings wear down, and screws/bolts can loosen. If you notice a lot of vibration, you can go around the tool to try and find anything loose. Many tools have a lot of adjustment points to ensure things are well balanced. If you are really handy, you can also replace bearings. Another trick I used with an old contractor saw was placing weights on the shelf under the body of the saw. Generally, more mass is less vibration; that’s why cabinet saws weigh so much.

    Really, if I were you, I would just post pictures of what you have to this community. That’s a good way to get more specific advice.





  • They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.

    Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.


  • In America, the government doesn’t technically have the right to know where you live. You don’t automatically get to vote without registering because the government doesn’t necessarily know where you live. You have to give your address to get a driver’s license, so often that government office also does voter registration.

    Before our elections, we have primaries. That’s where each party picks who the candidates are from that party, but they are a state-run event. Technically a party doesn’t need to do this, they could just submit their candidate to the final election. Every state does it a little differently, but in many states, you need to declare which party you are a part of in order to take part in the decision for who that party is sending to the election. In some states, it’s optional, and when you go to vote in a primary, you tell them which party you want to select the candidate for, and they give you that ballot. Other states are weird and do what’s called “caucusing”, where everyone from a particular party within that voting district meets up, and they try to come to a decision on which candidate to send forward. In those states, it’s not a blind vote, but you essentially get a sort of instant runoff, at least in my understanding.

    It looks like in Ireland, since you have multiple parties, you have more options at your elections, so you don’t have to help the parties pick their candidates?


  • I think it really goes back through history. Finland was a possession of Sweden and then Russia. The nobility would have spoken either of those languages depending on who was in charge, and ethnic Finns were essentially pawns for the larger powers, and the finnish language wasn’t even written down much.

    This changed when Russia started to crack down on Finnish culture, leading to a surge in pro-Finnish sentiment. People even changed their names from Swedish versions to finnish versions, and went from using “Christian” names to names from finnish mythology or culture. Actually, it’s somewhat similar to how black Americans changed naming conventions in the Civil rights era. The very concept of finnish-ness was somewhat of a working class concept. This, combined with a similar law of jante type belief meant there was and is much more of a focus on the collective good than in other countries.

    During the Russian revolution, a Civil War erupted between left wing and right wing, with the right wing wanting a German aristocratic monarchy over finland. The right wing actually won, but it was very short lived because Germany lost WW1 right aftwards, and a liberal democracy was formed. Finland was super poor, but started to build itself up as it’s own country.

    When WW2 rolled around, most people are familiar with the Winter War where they held their ground against a Russian invasion. Most people aren’t as familiar with the Continuation War against Russia, where they (with the support of germany) continued to fight against Russia, or the Lapland war, where they actually had to fight against Germany to kick them out of the country. The Germans actually used scorched earth on finland as they retreated, knowing they were losing WW2.

    After all of that, a huge swath of finland was destroyed by the Germans, or annexed by the Russians, leaving many homeless. Finland had to provide for those people, so homes were rebuilt rapidly throughout the country. Since they were in the soviet sphere of influence, but they weren’t a Warsaw pact country, they didn’t get any assistance from the eastern bloc (and they actually had to pay reparations as an axis country). They were also not included in the Marshall plan that helped provide recovery to western Europe.

    They survived as a people by taking care of each other, and they are very proud of that. If you go to a Finnish museum, next to works of art and science, you’ll see things like the baby box, or other displays about the establishment of the welfare state. Many countries have a welfare system, but treat it like a dirty secret, while they celebrate what they were able to accomplish.

    One last thing I think is really cool is that they are not afraid to experiment with policies. Many governments will do little trials of policy here and there, but not many go to the point of actually doing scientifically rigorous studies.




  • Do not just go to the hardware store and buy linseed oil. It is not food safe cause it is just meant as a wood finish, and has additives to make it dry quickly. You can buy linseed (aka flaxseed) oil that is meant to be eaten, but I’ve only seen it in small bottles for a lot of money.

    Mineral oil can be purchased from a pharmacy for very cheap; it’s actually sold as a laxative if you intentionally consume a bunch of it. That is what any wooden spoons or cutting boards you buy would be treated with. Some people mix it with melted beeswax, which gives a nice finish. You can also just buy it premixed and sold as " butcher block conditioner". It’s a little pricy, though, and I think it’s easiest to just use the mineral oil


  • There’s basically a tree of operations that have been applied to a model. At any point, you can go back and edit what you’ve done at a previous step. For example, if you padded a feature out 10 mm, then added more stuff onto that feature, you could still go back and change that padding operation to 15 mm.

    I’m still super new to freecad, and I haven’t done anything too complex in it yet, but my understanding is that some types of those changes can result in the topological naming problem. The way I understand it, when you make a shape, the software numbers all of the segments, vertices, and faces. If later changes are applied to those numbered faces, etc, and you go back and redo the operation that made those faces, etc, in a different order, the numbering will be different, and it will break your model.

    There is a fork of freecad that fixes that whole issue, but the fix hasn’t been implemented yet in the main fork cause it’s pretty foundational to the working of freecad, so there’s a lot of things that can break



  • It’s an interesting difference. Japan was always relatively iron-poor, so much of their woodworking evolved to use as little metal as possible, hence all the cool joinery. Pull saws take less iron to make than push saws cause they don’t have to deal with bowing.

    The one thing people need to also take into account is that Japanese workholding is often based on bodyweight, not relying on vices, clamps, or hold fasts. Sitting on the work piece, or putting a foot on it, and pulling to make cuts (or plane wood) works way better with a lower working height.

    TL;DR, if you are having trouble with Japanese saws, work lower.


  • It seems like that isn’t the case, though. If that were the case, having a math expression (with no parameters) wouldn’t work without specifying units. My pythagorean formula example works with no units specified at all. If you plug that into an expression, it gives you 5 mm. No matter what your units are set to. If your units are inches, it just shows up as .2 inch.

    “part_a.height = part_a.length + 5” doesn’t work even in mm, though, so something weird is afoot.


  • Yeah, I have it in decimal inches which is a bit easier to deal with. When I use parameters, and I have something like “part_a.length +5” and it gives a unit mismatch error cause the 5 is still assumed to be in mm even though the other parameter is in inches. If the expression has no parameters like sqrt(3^2 + 4^2 ), the result will be .2 inches, not 5 because it only does math in mm unless specifically instructed otherwise.

    I hear you on the laziness, though. There’s a lot of things I technically could do myself, but at a point it feels less like a hobby and more like a job.