You may have noticed that Toolmonger is missing yesterday’s posts and comments. Sadly this is due to the fact that we experienced an almost other-worldly server outage — what’s known in the biz as a RAID dual simultaneous drive failure.

While our awesome hosting service responded heroically spending almost 30 hours picking through the pieces and cannibalizing other hardware to bring Toolmonger back up and restore as much as possible, we did end up losing most of yesterday’s work. Those of you trying to visit Toolmonger during the overnight or early morning hours today may also have experienced outages.

First of all, though there’s really little we could do about this, we’re sorry for the inconvenience. Second, we can’t help but ask: Do any of you Toolmonger packrats have RSS feed or cached copies of the missing posts? If so, drop me a line at ccage@toolmonger.com. We’d love to restore the missing day for posterity.

Update: Thanks to Chris for pointing us to an available online cache! Look for the missing articles (though sadly not the comments) to return shortly.

Ever drop a toolbag after you spent 10 minutes climbing a ladder and positioning yourself on the roof ledge just right to attach a satellite dish? If so, you’ll totally feel for Astronaut Heide Stefanshyn-Piper whom the AP and others are razzing heavily over losing a toolbag in orbit yesterday.  Her task was to lubricate a jammed joint on one of the International Space Station’s solar panels, but it went wrong from the beginning: a grease gun leaked in the bag, coating everything with a thin layer of lube. Then the bag slipped from her hands as she worked to clean it.

Her response, according to the AP: “Oh, great!” That’s some remarkable restraint, especially considering that it’s not like they can pop down to Sears and grab a replacement. I’d have spewed something worse, I think. Thankfully she was able to get the job done with the team’s remaining tools, assuring a stable power supply for the station.

Anyway, how ’bout some solidarity and happy thoughts for a fellow Toolmonger busting her ass fixing things in orbit right now?

Endeavour Astronaut Loses Tools In Space [AP]
Astronaut Loses Tool Bag During Spacewalk [CNN]
STS-126 Mission Coverage [NASA]

Other reasons NASA is Toolmonger-Friendly:

• Need Help Wiring? NASA Shows You The Right Way
• Tool Pr0n: Tools In Space
• Re-Wiring The Space Station

Our friends over at Gizmodo dropped a fun post last week outlining “the 50 skills every geek should have,” and it inspired us to create a list of the 50 skills every Toolmonger should have. Think you know more about tools and DIY than most? Take our test — and don’t forget to score yourself via the poll at the end of the list. How many of these can you do?

1. Pull an engine
2. Own a toolbox with wheels
3. Mend a fence (extra credit for barbed wire)
4. Install a ceiling fan complete with remote
5. Build furniture for inside your home
6. Own and know when to use at least three kinds of drill bits
7. Pull a transmission
8. Visit a “pick ‘n pull” junkyard and actually pull your own parts
9. Buy steel in bulk (and negotiate for a discount)
10. Finish a wood project with stain (that’s not your own blood)
11. Sacrifice a full garage bay to your “shop”
12. Install dimmers in your home
13. Patch drywall cleanly enough to fool your significant other/landlord
14. Mix and pour your own concrete
15. Restore a $50 junk lawnmower to life
16. Hammer ten nails without bending them
17. Frame a small building (without a kit)
18. Operate a chainsaw without injury to you (or others)
19. Install your own crown molding with compound miter cuts
20. Start a non-fuel injected car that’s been sitting for weeks
21. Make your own picture frame with a router and miter saw
22. Cut accurate rabbet joints
23. Build a desk with drawers
24. Hang a door
25. Winterize a motorcycle
26. Change a tire yourself using only factory tools
27. Build an improvised BBQ grill out of steel and shop scrap
28. Remove dried wood stain and paint from bare concrete
29. Spray paint a project in the dark
30. Clean up crappy welds with a grinder
31. Fix anything with superglue
32. Plunge a toilet without getting crap on you
33. Make circ saw framing cuts without a sawhorse
34. Sharpen your own knife
35. Install/repair a toilet
36. Sweat copper tubing
37. Patch a leaking roof
38. Balance your central heat/air-conditioning system
39. Correctly wire a 3-way light switch
40. Fix a leaky faucet
41. Adjust a carburetor
42. Install a car stereo
43. Tow another vehicle
44. Build your own tool to get a job done
45. Complete a brake job for a quarter the cost of taking it to a shop
46. Tile a floor
47. Paint a room
48. Adjust a garage door (or repair it after you didn’t)
49. Install a window
50. Install a hot water heater

How'd you rate?
• (41-49) You're the neighborhood expert -- the guy everyone comes to for advice. You can build a space shuttle from duct tape, some "junk" from the shop, and superglue. You're a bad-ass. Period.
• (21-30) You can handle most jobs around the house, but you leave the heavy lifting to the pros.
• (31-40)For better or worse, you're convinced you can take on pretty much any job. And about half the time, you're right!
• (11-20) You like hanging out in the Crafstman department at Sears, but you have no idea why.
• (50) You should write for Toolmonger. Seriously, drop us a line.
• (1-10) You've seen Home Improvement, but your Tim Taylor fan club card is your only Toolmonger credential.
• (0) You're the guy who keeps accosting us to fix your s--- every time we take out the trash.
View Results

The Auriou company in France appears to have closed. My French is abysmal, so calling to investigate will do me no good, but this looks like an example of tool history slowly moving on. Auriou has been making rasps and rifflers by hand since the mid-nineteenth century — these tools, like so many before them, have now become irreplaceable.

If you own some of these quality woodworking tools, make sure to hang on to your piece of history and take good care of them.

Auriou [Official Site]

Pull the trigger and the drill spins; release the trigger and the drill spins. I can see that being a recall. Bosch advises “Stop using immediately” if you own their hammer drill model 1191VSRK. Even if yours hasn’t malfunctioned yet, you might consider contacting Bosch — and if it starts running as soon as you plug it in, you should absolutely call them.

(more…)

In the past few months while nobody was looking, Rockler.com quietly added a ton of home automation products to their online lineup. There’s no announcement on the site or in their RSS feeds, but if you look back though their new products page you’ll find a bunch of entries for security, surveillance, and access control products; audio/video products; lighting, appliance, and HVAC control; and even more unexpected products like shower heads.

(more…)

Toolmonger is growing, and we’re on the prowl for bloggers who have a passion for tools and all things Toolmonger. If you’ve got what it takes to join the Toolmonger team, drop us a line at jobs (at) postlabmedia.com with the subject line “Toolmonger Writer Search.” In the body give us your name, your three favorite tools, and two original, unpublished posts of around 50 to 200 words in the Toolmonger style.

Our parent company, PostLab Media, is also seeking bloggers for FullOnCustom.com, so if you’d like to write about car customization instead of tools, just tailor sample writing to that style instead.

A few notes: We’ll delete all emails with attachments, so include all your text in the email body itself. Only official submissions, please: we ignore comments on this post. Not the world’s best writer? If you’re the world’s best tool finder, we might be able to help. Our biggest requirements are that you’re interested and that you’re committed.

Good luck!

Craftsman, a century-old staple of Sears’ tool department may soon operate independently of its department-store master. According to a CNN report, “Sears Holdings Corp. plans to reorganize into several companies,” specifically it appears that they intend to split out the Craftsman and Diehard brands. CNN interviewed a Sears spokeswoman who said that the new structure would provide the “operating businesses with greater control, authority and autonomy.”

The combination of Sears and Craftsman has always been a real powerhouse in the industry, mating decent quality, inexpensive tools to an easily-accessible retail store — a task that other tool manufacturers (lacking their own retail facilities) have found daunting. Could this split mean that we’ll see Craftsman tools for sale in other retailers — even Wal-Mart? Or could this announcement lead to further inroads for other manufacturers into Sears tool aisles?

We can’t help but think that with its own corporate structure, Craftsman might choose to bring more design and manufacturing back in house — which might help to improve the some-are-great-some-not-so-much quality of their power tool and yard equipment lines.

One thing’s certain: if Craftsman retains their prominent Sears placement and expands to other retailers, hand tool manufacturers everywhere will be sweating this year.

We’ll keep a close eye on this story and will pass on any information as we come across it.

Sears To Break Into Several Companies [CNN Money]

You read that right: over the holidays we quietly passed the 1,000 image mark in the Toolmonger photo pool. Actually we’re sitting at 1,134 as I write this. That’s a lot of great photos of shops, tools, and projects — plenty to keep us busy when we should be working…

In celebration of this momentous occasion (and truly awesome opportunity to avoid work!) we’re going to give away some more gloves. In fact, we’re going to give away a pair a day to some of our favorite photos.

Thanks again to everyone who’s participating in the pool, and if by some miracle you’re one of the few that hasn’t yet spent some screw-off time farming around in the pictures to see what everyone else is up to tool-wise, don’t be afraid — give it a look.

Toolmonger’s Photo Pool [Flickr]

We hope you had an enjoyable and safe time last night, and are properly resting up today — we certainly are. As we get ready to prepare the traditional Texas New Year’s Day feast of black-eyed peas and sausage, we’re looking forward to another great year of Toolmongering.

See you tomorrow.

As you might imagine, we’re taking today off to spend some time with family and friends. We’re looking forward to unwrapping some sweet tools under the tree, and we hope you are, too.

It’s been a great year here at Toolmonger, largely because of you, our readers. We crank out content every day because we love reading your comments, listening to your calls, and learning new things about tools. Hanging out at Toolmonger is sorta like hanging out at a friend’s shop — which just happens to contain all the tools and knowledge of thousands and thousands of readers.

So thank you for taking the time to read and comment, and please accept a heartfelt happy holidays from everyone who makes TM happen.

Remember the Tite-Tie, the famous trucker’s knot for dummies? We posted about it back in March after receiving a tip from an astute reader, and the post generated a lot of discussion — both positive and negative. At the time it was only available in Australia, though inventor Chris Howard posted in comments that “it’d be available in the US soon.”

Well, today we received an email from him indicating that the Tite-Tie is now available at Home Depot. We tried in vain to find it via the ‘Depot’s infamously-bad search engine, but then again my recent search for “rigid conduit” didn’t return a single stick of conduit, either. So we’ll probably have to look in the brick ‘n mortar isles to see for sure.

If anyone happens to see it in the store, let us know in comments. And if you pick one up, we’d love to hear how it fares in actual use.

Original Tite-Tie Post [Toolmonger]

Toolmonger is growing, and we’re on the prowl for bloggers who have a passion for tools and all things Toolmonger.  If you’ve got what it takes to join the Toolmonger team, drop us a line at jobs (at) postlabmedia.com with the subject line “Toolmonger Writer Search.”  In the body give us your name, your three favorite tools, and two original, unpublished posts of around 50 to 200 words in the Toolmonger style.

Our parent company, PostLab Media, is also seeking bloggers for FullOnCustom.com, so if you’d like to write about car customization instead of tools, just tailor sample writing to that style instead.

A few notes: We’ll delete all emails with attachments, so include all your text in the email body itself. Only official submissions, please: we ignore comments on this post. Not the world’s best writer?  If you’re the world’s best tool finder, we might be able to help.  Our biggest requirements are that you’re interested and that you’re committed.

Good luck!

Welcome back to the work week — and to new Toolmonger content. We took a few much-needed days off to regroup and enjoy the turkey, and we spent some quality time in the shop. (We’ll share the results of that labor later!) 

Having spent the last few weekends recovering from work and other obligations, we decided to get off our asses this weekend and hit the shop to get some real work done. And we certainly don’t want to leave you, our Toolmonger friends, out. So we’ve officially declared today and tomorrow Get Off Your Ass Weekend.

If you’re not sure what kind of project you want to jump into, just check back all weekend here on Toolmonger for suggestions we’ve collected from some of the other sites we haunt when we’re not writing. From massive to mundane, we’ve got you covered.

And if you get a chance, post some pictures of your GOYAW project work in the Toolmonger photo pool for a chance to win some work gloves. See you on the flip side — with some new projects completed and out-of-the-way!

We’re on the prowl for bloggers who have a passion for tools and all things Toolmonger.  If you’ve got what it takes to join the Toolmonger team, drop us a line at jobs (at) postlabmedia.com with the subject line “Toolmonger Writer Search.”  In the body give us your name, your three favorite tools, and two original, unpublished posts of around 50 to 200 words in the Toolmonger style.

Our parent company, PostLab Media, is also seeking bloggers for FullOnCustom.com, so if you’d like to write about car customization instead of tools, just tailor sample writing to that style instead.

A few notes: We’ll delete all emails with attachments, so include all your text in the email body itself. Only official submissions, please: we ignore comments on this post. Not the world’s best writer?  If you’re the world’s best tool finder, we might be able to help.  Our biggest requirements are that you’re interested and that you’re committed.

Good luck!

Sean and I will be at Maker Faire in Austin this weekend (October 20th and 21st), and we hope to see you there. There are lots of reasons to go — check out Make’s site for information on all the great Makers who’ll be there showing off their projects and ideas — but here are a few special reasons for Toolmongers to attend:

1. We’ll be testing tools!

Swing by the Toolmonger area to help us test the ergonomics and fit of mechanic’s tools. We’ve got a big special scheduled for early November, and we need your help to find the best tools for the price.

2. Stanley’s joining us, and the two of us will be giving away tools all weekend.

Stanley’s co-sponsoring the event with us, and they’ve brought out a truck full of tools to give away — all sorts of fun stuff. It’ll be a great time.

3. You can meet Jimmy Addison.

You’re not really a tool guy (or gal) until you’ve met Jimmy. He works for Stanley’s Discovery Team and is easily one of the most knowledgable guys we’ve met in the business. Got a question about Stanley? He can probably answer it. And he’s a hoot to hang out with, too.

4. We’re gonna break s#!%!

That’s right. Next week is Break S#!% week, and we’re gonna kick it off right at Maker Faire. With Stanley’s help, we’re gonna demolish a small building — with hand tools. Register your guess on how long it’ll take us to flatten it, and you might win some larger tools. (You can score smaller ones regardless. Really!)

And if you need any more reasons to show up, check out our coverage of Maker Faire’s last stop in San Francisco. Think of Maker Faire as a big party for people just like you.

We’ll see you there. Of course, if you’re stuck in Alaska, your next best bet is to check back here for our live blogging of the event all weekend.

Maker Faire Austin [Make]