shop tips and wisdom

  To those who work with their hands professionally, perhaps these won't seem to marvelous, but these are tools to which I frequently pointed customers when I worked in a hardware store, and which I personally find to be frequently handy problem-solvers.

 The top two items are different types of screw-holders.  Handy for putting screws into holes you can't actually reach.  The top one is for Phillips screws, and has two spring blades which press outward against the cavity of Phillips-head screws.  The second one fits straight-blade screws on one and and Phillips on the other, it works by essentially being a screwdriver blade, the center part of which rotates to jam in the screw's slot.

 The third item down is a pair of nut pliers. These have v-grooves in the and and in the sides to hold a nut in a hard-to-access place in either of two orientations: end-on or side-on.

 Item #4 may at first seem goofy and pointless, but it is not.  It is simply a pair of long-reach pliers, good for getting into a hard-to-reach spot, but this pair sacrifices neither jaw opening nor jaw leverage vs. any pair of same-length pliers with one joint (no matter where you locate that one joint).  You may not need them often, but when you do, you thank yourself once again for buying them.  I am considering buying the bent-jaw version.

 My previous post about marking stuff in a metal shop neglected to mention a very important item no Real Man™'s workshop should be without: nail polish.

 Nail polish is very hard, but tough, acrylic paint which sticks to just about anything short of Teflon™and is also resistant to abrasion, oils, coolant, brief exposures to solvents, and hatred.

 Back before the brand's mindshare-time-quotient expired in the mind of some marketroid somewhere, I used to buy something called Hard As Nails, because it was cheap and it advertised durability.  It also seemed to deliver durability.  So naturally you can't get it any more.  The stuff in the photo is the brand who bought / own the brand name "Hard As Nails", they just no longer market that name.  Presumably they own the same intellectual property, although I am reasonably certain most nail polish is roughly the same ingredients.  Buy whatever's cheap.

 Surfaces must be clean for it to stick reliably, not too surprisingly.  On plastic surfaces, try etching the surface to be marked with acetone, assuming acetone will touch it.  On truly bare, truly clean metal, it will stay for YEARS in high-wear locations. (hint-hint)

 Now then, if you do (or are learning to do, or intend to learn) any sort of electrical work around the house, or electronics work, you need at least one pair of these crimp handles as shown at right.

 And the reason why is those removable jaws, called "dies", which I have removed from the crimp handles by removing two screws.

 That's why every handy person you need a pair of these handles; you can get the crimp dies by themselves for an incredible array of connectors and parts of connectors such as pins and sockets, coaxial cable connector crimps, and so on... all of which fit this one pair of handles.

 This style of handle used to be fairly expensive - $80 and up - when the only people who bought them were electronics professionals.  But when Structured Wiring became The Next Big Thing for homeowners, they started showing up in most major hardware stores for around $40 or even less and they are worth every penny.

 If you're a cheapskate, you can just own one set of handles and buy only the dies you need for your digital cable, or for the molex pins for the power connector on the back of your radio, or - you get the idea.

 

 

I have no idea how this one crept in here.