techniques

How-To:  Get screws to hold in end grain

How-To: Get screws to hold in end grain

I’m not a carpenter by training, but I have built a lot of simple furniture, and blogged about a lot of simple furniture, and one of the rules of thumb I’ve picked up from the pros is that threading screws into end grain is a big no-no. Wood is not an isotropic material, because of the grain, and is relatively weak in that direction. But sometimes putting screw in end-grain is the best/simplest way to do things, and until I saw this simple trick from woodgears.ca, the only way I knew to do it was to use a barrel nut or some other relatively unusual and expensive fastener designed for the purpose.

How-To: Remove a rear-view mirror button

How-To: Remove a rear-view mirror button

Awhile back, I wrote about co-opting the awesome glue used to mount rear-view mirrors for hobby projects. An interested reader e-mailed me a couple weeks later asking if I knew how to remove a rear-view mirror button from a windshield, which I didn’t. Several people have reported that trying to forcibly remove the metal button from the glass can actually break a divot of glass out of the windshield. I was therefore not optimistic, but we talked a little about the idea of using an organic solvent combined with sharp lateral pressure parallel to the glass. She experimented a bit, and, what do you know, eventually succeeded! Here’s her report:

More handy tool tips

More handy tool tips

One of the many wonderful things about editing The Best of Instructables was getting to delve deeper into the content on the site and getting to know (or at least the work of) some of the characters that make Instructables their virtual workshop. One such person is Tim Anderson (who I mainly knew of from […]

Misc tool tips

Misc tool tips

I’m fascinated by “street tech,” by how people actually use tools and technologies in ways their designers never intended. I’m also fascinated by improvisation, of all kinds. As a result, I’m slightly obsessed with tool tips, those funky, ingenious, and “why didn’t I think of that?” ways that people use (and abuse) the tools in […]