Maybe something you learned the hard way, or something you found out right before making a huge mistake.

E.g., for audiophiles: don’t buy subwoofers from speaker companies, and don’t buy speakers from subwoofer companies.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    Another woodworker:

    Huge +1 for a bench plane and a shooting board. Even in a mainly power tool shop, you can make things much more precisely square or mitered if you shoot them.

    For marking cuts, use a knife not a pencil. When you use a pencil to mark your cuts, you limit yourself to guiding your tools with only your vision, not unlike a Tesla. When you score the line with a knife, you create a reference surface (one of the two sides of the cut, hopefully the one against your square) that has no thickness, and you can feel when a knife or chisel clicks against that surface. For saw cuts, you can use a chisel to pare away a little bit from the waste side to form a knife wall, which forms a little ramp that will guide a saw against your reference surface.

    Wax literally everything. Wax your work surfaces, tablesaw top, jointer beds, planer bed, fences, plane soles, bikini lines, saw plates, screw threads…wax literally everything.

    Learn how to do most common operations by hand. Square some rough lumber by hand with a bench plane. Chop a mortise with a chisel. Cut a tenon with a backsaw. Make dovetails by hand. Even if you’re a power tool woodworker and you’ve got a jointer and a thickness planer and a table saw and a rapidly growing number of routers, knowing how to do things by hand will help you understand just what it is you’re doing.

    Do not suffer a dull tool to live. If your tool is getting dull, sharpen it. Sharpening is kinda personal, I think if cilantro tastes like soap to you you’ll prefer oilstones, if you have that tendon in your wrist you’ll like waterstones, if you can roll your tongue you’ll prefer diamond plates and if you have more money than god you’ll buy a Tormach. They’ll all sharpen a blade. Find the system you like and use it. If your tool is dull, sharpen it. Put it away sharp, don’t put it away dull.

    Use your ears. You can tell a lot about what’s going on with a tool by listening to it.

    • gloktawasright@lemm.ee
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      5 hours ago

      Great additions! Using a marking knife is a big upgrade.

      Dull tools are the death of accuracy and enjoyment alike.

      Cheers

      • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.ml
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        5 hours ago

        Dull tools are the death of accuracy and enjoyment alike.

        Same in cooking. A sharp knife is a safe knife. If you are pushing to cut you will have an accident.