Can you fashion some sort of rudimentary lathe?
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No, but I bet I could fashion a machine that could make a rudimentary lathe.
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Keep that up and you’ll end up back at Dave Gingery.
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Or Grugh son of Ugh. I could probably find a suitable rock to start the whole process.
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Cool
My Grandmother was the tool expert in the family. Every kid should learn how to use tools by their Grandma
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I feel so proud that I already knew all those tape-measure tips. But when she said, “you might not have a pencil on you,” I almost threw my tape measure.
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Awhile back one of Leah’s DIY vids (the best on YT) pulled my bacon out of the fire when I had to deal with a water shutoff valve plumbed in with a son-of-a-bitchin’ compression ring that was way too close to the wall. (Darn house builders!) Saved me a couple of hundred bucks, at least.
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Holy shit, that’s genius.
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Leviton, the brand sold at Home Depot, has the guide but not the wire stripper.
Incidentally, the length gauge is only accurate if you’re back-wiring (pushing the wires through the holes most people don’t know about, instead of wrapping them around the screws on the sides).
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This was dad’s greatest lesson to me. As a young teen he won a scholarship to study engineering but couldn’t accept it as his family couldn’t afford for him not to work (my grandfather had had a motorcycle accident*) so instead he did an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner. Sixty years later his attitude is still “don’t solve a problem; build a machine to solve the problem in perpetuity”.
His only literal advice to me was “make sure you have at least 15amp (at 240v) power in your garage, but preferably 3-phase power, because you’ll need a lathe.” I grew up with a lathe in the garage that had an iron base that could have been cast in 1850, and looked like the industrial revolution in action.
I’m a haphazard klutz for a lot of things, but when dad handed me a micrometer or a tap and die I took that shit seriously.
*which was the source of its own stories, including why my gran ran an illegal betting shop from their shed…
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I have wall switches that have gauges both for the push-in connections and the screw terminals, labelled as such.
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