Quotulatiousness

November 19, 2020

Buying vintage chisels online: a complete guide

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rex Krueger
Published 18 Nov 2020

Is it possible to find a quality chisel online? Let’s look at the best tricks and tips.

More video and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger
Narex True Imperial Chisels: https://amzn.to/2EX4xls

More tool buying and restoration guides
– Vintage saw restoration: https://youtu.be/cN8yMAXp54s
– Antique tool hunting: https://youtu.be/MlYZiSTLulg
– Flea market tool hunting: https://youtu.be/_zNUwIi3tCw

Sign up for Fabrication First, my FREE newsletter: http://eepurl.com/gRhEVT

Wood Work for Humans Tool List (affiliate):
*Cutting*
Gyokucho Ryoba Saw: https://amzn.to/2Z5Wmda
Dewalt Panel Saw: https://amzn.to/2HJqGmO
Suizan Dozuki Handsaw: https://amzn.to/3abRyXB
(Winner of the affordable dovetail-saw shootout.)
Spear and Jackson Tenon Saw: https://amzn.to/2zykhs6
(Needs tune-up to work well.)
Crown Tenon Saw: https://amzn.to/3l89Dut
(Works out of the box)
Carving Knife: https://amzn.to/2DkbsnM
Narex True Imperial Chisels: https://amzn.to/2EX4xls
(My favorite affordable new chisels.)
Blue-Handled Marples Chisels: https://amzn.to/2tVJARY
(I use these to make the DIY specialty planes, but I also like them for general work.)

*Sharpening*
Honing Guide: https://amzn.to/2TaJEZM
Norton Coarse/Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/36seh2m
Natural Arkansas Fine Oil Stone: https://amzn.to/3irDQmq
Green buffing compound: https://amzn.to/2XuUBE2

*Marking and Measuring*
Stockman Knife: https://amzn.to/2Pp4bWP
(For marking and the built-in awl).
Speed Square: https://amzn.to/3gSi6jK
Stanley Marking Knife: https://amzn.to/2Ewrxo3
(Excellent, inexpensive marking knife.)
Blue Kreg measuring jig: https://amzn.to/2QTnKYd
Round-head Protractor: https://amzn.to/37fJ6oz

*Drilling*
Forstner Bits: https://amzn.to/3jpBgPl
Spade Bits: https://amzn.to/2U5kvML

*Work-Holding*
Orange F Clamps: https://amzn.to/2u3tp4X
Screw Clamp: https://amzn.to/3gCa5i8

Get my woodturning book: http://www.rexkrueger.com/book

Follow me on Instagram: @rexkrueger

April 1, 2019

How to hide shop expenses from your spouse

Filed under: Humour, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rex Krueger
Published on 14 Mar 2018

More videos and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger

In a spirit of fun and humor, I give you this guide to buying tools and materials and then hiding the expenses from your wife or husband. I’ll show you how to mix shop supplies in with groceries or auto parts and use the internet to keep some money on the side. You can also learn how to hide your paper-trail and smuggle packages into the house.

Also, this video is dedicated to all the husbands and wives who make shop life possible by working real jobs and helping us realize our dreams.

June 21, 2018

Buying quality used hand tools

Filed under: Business, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I didn’t agree with everything Steve rants about here, but he does make some good points:

A small selection of bench planes: front to back, a jack plane, a junior Jack, a (garbage grade) #4 smoother, and a #3-equivalent smoother.

I’ve decided to punish humanity with a tool rant.

Back when I still had a real Internet connection, I put a video up on Youtube. In the video, I fixed up a $15 Harbor Freight wood plane, just to see if I could make it work. I got it to function, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone else try it.

A commenter said I should buy planes at garage sales. That set me off. The bag of pet peeves ruptured, and now I must rant.

Garage sales are only good for three types of people: mentally ill hoarders who buy crap, young people who live in poverty, and professional shoppers who snap up the best merchandise and put it on Ebay and Etsy.

That’s it. I will explain.

Say you’re 45 years old, and you decide you want a hand plane collection. To do woodworking well, you really need 4 or 5 planes, and you’re better off with a dozen. Different planes do different things well. Block planes are good for tight spaces and breaking corners. Jointing planes are good for jointing, obviously. Smoothing planes are good for, well, smoothing. Rabbet planes make rabbets. You can’t buy one plane and make it do everything. You’re going to need a bunch of planes.

You’ve already blown it by reaching 45 without collecting any planes. Now you have to catch up. Say you start going to garage sales.

Look at the paper or the web. There are no promising sales this week. Probably. Most of the time, the sales you read about look really bad. Action figures with missing arms and spit all over them, plus things like lamps with torn shades. IKEA furniture that ought to be burned. Maybe you’ll see a good sale in a couple of weeks. You may find 10 sales a year that are worth leaving the house for.

When you go to these sales, 9 of them will turn out to be losers. The other one will have one or two decent items.

To get those items, you will have to get up before the sun rises and do some driving. If you show up an hour after the sales start, the things you want will be gone. Tools go fast. Every city now has a fleet of professional shoppers who raid garage sales as early as possible and take all the good stuff. If you’re not there at the start, you’re dead. And what if you have two promising sales on the same day? You can get to one early enough to score, but you’ll be late for the other one

If you get the items you want, they probably won’t really be the items you want. By that I mean you won’t be able to choose brands and models. Want to collect a set of Stanley type 13 planes? Forget it. You’ll have to take a type 11, a 1990 plane from Home Depot, a Craftsman … whatever happens to be available. You will eventually get items that do what you want, but you’ll have to settle.

If you insist on good tools, you’ll have your woodworking shop equipped in about 20 years. During those years, you will have had to struggle without important tools. You will have had to forgo a lot of projects. You will become farsighted. You may get cataracts. You may get arthritis in your hands. You may need new hips. You’ll feel less like getting things done. The TV and the shuffleboard court will beckon.

You’ll miss out on the fun you would have had if you had bought your tools as early as possible.

You may drop dead, and then other people will buy your tools at your wife’s garage sale.

June 25, 2016

Canada’s massively counter-productive protectionist racket

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At (of all places) the CBC, Neil Macdonald explains why the Canadian government maintains a ridiculously low limit on what Canadians can purchase from other countries without packages being subject to duty, tax, delay, and possible damage:

As any Canadian who’s ever naively bought anything on the American version of eBay (or, for that matter, any U.S. retail website) must by now know, Ottawa is determined to spoil your bargain.

If the purchase is a penny over $20 Cdn, a federal customs agent can intercept it, open it, delay it, add federal and provincial sales taxes, and, depending on the origin of the merchandise, perhaps pile on some duty charges — basically protectionist taxes.

By the time the government is done, the price of the package can easily rise by 50 per cent. And of course customs brokers usually have to wet their beaks, inflating the final cost of the average package by another 20, 30 or 40 per cent.

Basically, Ottawa has ensured that shipping across our border is such an expensive, paperwork-heavy pain that a lot of American merchants and eBay sellers simply don’t bother shipping to Canada.

The system actually seems designed to be burdensome and sclerotic.

Normally, you’d assume it’s all about increasing the federal government’s tax revenues … the CRA must be raking in the bucks, right? Not at all:

… by keeping that purchase threshold at $20 instead of giving Canadian shoppers a break and raising it to $80, Ottawa spends about $166 million to collect $39 million in additional taxes and duties.

Think about that: Ottawa’s customs officials spend a net $127 million of taxpayers’ money annually, basically to keep Canadians trapped inside the Canadian retail corral.

H/T to SDA for the link.

May 29, 2015

QotD: Buying modern indulgences for Silicon Valley billionaires

Filed under: Business, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Silicon Valley is an American success story. At a time of supposed American decline, a gifted group of young entrepreneurs invented, merchandized, and institutionalized everything from smartphones and eBay to Google and Facebook. The collective genius within a small corridor from San Francisco to Stanford University somehow put hand-held electronics into over a billion households worldwide — and hundreds of billions of dollars in profits rolled into Northern California, and America at large.

Stranger yet, Silicon Valley excelled at 1950s-style profit-driven capitalism while projecting the image of hip and cool. The result is a bizarre 21st-century 1-percenter culture of $1,000-a-square-foot homes, $100,000 BMWs, and $500 loafers coexisting with left-wing politics and trendy pop culture. Silicon Valley valiantly tries to square the circle of driving a Mercedes or flying in a Gulfstream while lambasting those who produce its fuel.

But the paradox finally has reached its logically absurd end. In medieval times, rich sinners sought to save their souls by buying indulgences to wash away their sins. In the updated version, Silicon Valley crony capitalists and wheeler-dealers buy exemption for their conspicuous consumption with loud manifestations of cool left-wing politics.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Valley of the Shadow: How mansion-dwelling, carbon-spewing cutthroat capitalists can still be politically correct”, National Review, 2014-07-22.

April 3, 2015

The rise and fall of the Beanie Baby bubble

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

City Journal‘s Laura Vanderkam looks at the amazing and unlikely fad that swept much of North America until the wheels came off:

In the last few years of the twentieth century, speculative mania gripped seemingly normal Americans. People debated prices in online chat rooms. They devoured literature claiming that sound fundamentals, not froth, led to sky-high valuations. The frenzy grew and then, suddenly, the bubble burst. People lost everything.

This describes the dot-com crash, but it also describes a less-remembered mania for adorable plush toys known as Beanie Babies. In The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, journalist Zac Bissonnette blends the unlikely economics of an asset class encompassing Kiwi the Toucan and Happy the Hippo, and the unhappy tale of Ty Warner, the ruthless tycoon behind them, into a saga far more entertaining than a business book deserves to be.

Like many in the toy industry, it turns out, Warner had an unhappy childhood. His father abused his sister; his mentally ill mother would later steal Warner’s car. Perhaps to compensate, Warner developed an obsessive attachment to stuffed animals. After beginning his career as a salesman, he threw himself into getting the details of the animals he designed for his eponymous toy company right. The eyes in particular had to lock on a buyer. He once borrowed an employee’s pearl necklace to be sure the pearlescent color of a product’s fur was correct. He wanted all his toys to be worthy of bearing his name, “Ty,” on the ubiquitous heart-shaped tags.

From the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey, “his two biggest competitive advantages — obsessive attention to detail and trade-show charisma—outweighed his myriad disadvantages: lack of scale, no advertising budget, a small and not especially competent sales force, a limited product line, and little in the way of a track record with retailers,” Bissonnette writes. Warner would sell only to small stores — a declining market — because he never wanted to see his precious animals end up in a big-box discount bin. Yet the resulting difficulty this created for customers wound up adding to the mystique. People like a hunt. Fortune was kind to Warner for a while, and the limited availability, coupled with strategic “retirements” of desired Beanie Babies, boosted demand. A few collectors started re-selling rare Beanie Babies on eBay. As they made money and told their friends, a mania ensued.

January 4, 2015

When companies bought into the open plan workspace model

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In the Washington Post, Lindsey Kaufman recounts her experience when her workplace changed to the “open-office model”:

A year ago, my boss announced that our large New York ad agency would be moving to an open office. After nine years as a senior writer, I was forced to trade in my private office for a seat at a long, shared table. It felt like my boss had ripped off my clothes and left me standing in my skivvies.

Our new, modern Tribeca office was beautifully airy, and yet remarkably oppressive. Nothing was private. On the first day, I took my seat at the table assigned to our creative department, next to a nice woman who I suspect was an air horn in a former life. All day, there was constant shuffling, yelling, and laughing, along with loud music piped through a PA system. As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my frequent bathroom trips. At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time. I beelined to the Beats store to purchase their best noise-cancelling headphones in an unmistakably visible neon blue.

Despite its obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers across the country. Now, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions, according to the International Facility Management Association. Silicon Valley has been the leader in bringing down the dividers. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Goldman Sachs and American Express are all adherents. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisted famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world, housing nearly 3,000 engineers. And as a businessman, Michael Bloomberg was an early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and fairness. He famously carried the model into city hall when he became mayor of New York, making “the Bullpen” a symbol of open communication and accessibility to the city’s chief.

These new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company’s space while minimizing costs. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited personal cellphone use isn’t occupying billing hours. But employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. Meanwhile, “ease of interaction” with colleagues — the problem that open offices profess to fix — was cited as a problem by fewer than 10 percent of workers in any type of office setting. In fact, those with private offices were least likely to identify their ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue. In a previous study, researchers concluded that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction … was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices.”

I work in the software industry and it’s been nearly 20 years since I last had a private office. Every company I’ve worked for since then has either consciously been moving in the open office direction, or unwilling to spend money to partition open space in whatever office space they had. Sometimes, I even get nostalgic for cube farms…

June 21, 2011

Would you pay $23,698,655.93 for a book about flies?

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

This link was sent to one of my various mailing lists. It’s an amusing little story about a very expensive book and how the price on eBay got so out of hand:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly — a classic work in developmental biology that we — and most other Drosophila developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.

At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random — suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

October 5, 2009

Maybe this is why some eBay sellers don’t ship outside the US

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:10

Words fail me:

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with — get this — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That’s right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary — based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.

[. . .]

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn’t have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal — but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty’s new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

H/T to Radley Balko.

October 1, 2009

Ephemera

Filed under: Railways, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:25

I think this is the first time I’ve seen some of my old work for sale on eBay:

THBHS_back_issues

I was the original editor for TH&B Focus, finally burning out on the job midway through the fifth year of publication.

August 17, 2009

eBay now hosting “Sleep with Marilyn Monroe” auction

Filed under: USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:52

That is, they’re running an auction for the burial plot immediately above the one occupied by the mortal remains of Marilyn Monroe:

When it comes to sleeping with a bona fide Hollywood sex symbol, death need not necessarily be an impediment. Thanks to Los Angeles widow Elsie Poncher, who is auctioning off a burial plot atop that occupied by Marilyn Monroe, it may even count as an advantage.

Poncher’s advertisment on eBay offers prospective corpses the chance to “spend eternity directly above Marilyn Monroe”. Bidding opened last week at $500,000 (£300,000) and has already topped $4.5m, with more than seven days left to run.

July 22, 2009

Further adventures with eBay, now with extra PayPal goodness

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:27

Jon had an unhappy experience buying an old magazine on eBay (see here). It apparently got even better, once PayPal entered the picture:

Remember the magazine I told you about? The one with the $12 shipping?

It gets better.

I have a PC Financial chequing account associated with my PayPal account so that I can get money out of PayPal and into my bank. I do not keep any money in this account as I don’t want PayPal sneaking off with anything. Turns out that not keeping money in there was a bad idea.

When I paid for the magazine, PayPal first tried to use the BANK ACCOUNT, rather than my Visa, to pay for the purchase. The transaction was declined by PC Financial and I was charged a $40 NSF fee.

Forty. F**king. Dollars.

I just paid forty dollars to have Galen Weston f**k my ass.

PayPal then went ahead and billed my Visa for the transaction, which I what I expected them to do in the first place.

When the f**k did PayPal change how they fund transactions? They have ALWAYS billed my Visa for purchases — they have NEVER tried to pull the amount from my bank account before. I this something they have changed recently, or what?

Total cost for the magazine so far: $54.19

Expensive magazine! I asked if it was okay to post the follow-on to the original story and he wrote:

Be sure to highlight the bit about Galen Weston and my ass.

I know it’s not really his bank — it’s CIBC — but it’s his brand. Which somehow makes it even more of a rip-off.

Humph.

[. . .]

About funding the account: it turns out that what I experienced is their new default when you have a bank account associated with your PayPal account. I don’t recall being notified of that, so it’s my own damn fault for not reading the fine print, but still — that sort of change in behavior should not happen automatically.

[. . .]

Total cost for the magazine: $56.28.

Oh — on shipping: I looked up the shipping cost for the USPS Flat Rate Envelope the guy used. His surcharge was only $2.00 — the actual postage was, indeed, over ten bucks. Does not really make me feel all that much better, but I guess the guy was not really being a total jerk about it.

July 17, 2009

eBay sellers hidden profit source?

Filed under: Economics, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:24

Jon, my virtual landlord, has had a love-hate relationship with eBay for a while. This morning, the “love” phase seemed short and under-used:

Bought a magazine yesterday. Four bucks. Seemed like a good deal. Auction notes that out-of-USA losers should ask for an invoice to get their shipping rate. Thinking that shipping would be, oh, I don’t know, another four bucks or so, I figured what the hell, and use the Get Reamed Up The Ass Now button to buy the thing.

Shipping?

Twelve bucks.

Frig.

Thinking that this was, perhaps, a one-time thing — just a spot of bad luck — I looked around today for another book that I would like to have. Found the book. Brand-new reprint of a rather old book for twenty bucks. Again, a decent deal. Shipping to Canada? Twenty. Two. Dollars. So, no book for me.

No wonder there’s a recession, the dumb wankers.

Speaking of wankers: I took at look at the new Schwarz plane book and thought “what the hell.” So I started the online ordering process. Shipping to Canada for the book and a set of DVDs (on a topic that shall remain nameless)? Thirty. Two. Dollars. Cap-and-trade this, wood-boy. I did not proceed with the order.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Humph.

I’ve found some eBay sellers like this: they seem to feel that the extra labour of filling in a customs sticker requires them to make a profit of 2-3 times the actual cost of shipping. After getting burned that way once, I’ve always been careful to check shipping costs before bidding.

When I requested Jon’s permission to use his email on the blog, he replied with this:

I guess so. What I sent is not nearly as memorable as the first draft, though. I originally had something in there about how, after Obama nationalizes their health care, I hope the eBayers all get scrofula and schistosomiasis and itch for the rest of their lives; but then I looked up scrofula and schistosomiasis to confirm the spelling and decided that wishing those on anyone, no matter how much they distend my rectum with their take-it-up-the-ass shipping rates (Rectum?! Damn near killed him!), was just a bit over the top.

(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005593.html.)

Powered by WordPress