Right now Kingsley North has the Raytech Tumble Vibe TV-5 vibratory tumbler for $90 with free shipping.

I admit I have tumbling on my mind a lot these days as I try to work out the best method for finishing production runs of our jewelry. Vibratory tumblers are excellent for using abrasive plastic media and ceramic burnishing media for finishing metal as well as for rock tumbling. Vibratory tumbling tends to be much quicker than rotary tumbling. This is not the same as the vibratory tumblers used for polishing as I posted in a previous Dealmonger; it is meant for heavier work, albeit smaller.

My only quibble with the Kingsley North deal is that the free shipping is actually $2.45 ($1.00 handing, $1.00 “special fee” and .45 insurance). It is still the lowest price out there for a small vibratory tumbler, however. And yes, I ordered one…

Raytech TV-5 [kingsleynorth.com]

(TV Tonight, Wednesday, November 4th, 2009) A new Mythbusters tonight about hurricanes and liquid nitrogen.

All times are central

• Ask This Old House: Replacing a Clogged Aerator, Proper Houseplant Care (DIY, 5:30 pm)
• Cool Tools: Power Play (DIY, 6:00 pm)
• MythBusters: End With a Bang (Discovery, 6:00 pm)
• MythBusters: Greased Lightning (Discovery, 7:00 pm)
• MythBusters: Hurricane Windows (Discovery, 8:00 pm) NEW
• MythBusters: Balloon Child; Ping Pong Rescue (Discovery, 9:00 pm)

This old dresser has been handed down through two generations of my family before I had it. It’s close to 50 years old and has been reworked more than once. It has no particular value save its clothes-holding properties. It has been in my bedroom for close to 30 years and it’s time for a change – preferably to something a little less Sgt. Pepper. It was time to overhaul this piece again.

As you can see this dresser has seen its share of beatings — admittedly some of them were at my hands — and the hardware has been replaced at least three times. The last time was my fault; when my mom asked what I wanted for new knobs, I answered brass because it was shiny (I was ten) and she dutifully stuck sixteen brass knobs on it to create what you see here. Read the rest of this entry »

Anybody with kids or grandkids has gone through the childproofing stage. You find yourself crawling around on all fours, permanently damaging your nice cabinets (and maybe your knees) by installing safety latches to keep the wee ones out of unfriendly places like cleaning cupboards. Then after a few weeks you find yourself walking halfway across the house to throw something away in your bedroom rather than fuss with opening the latch to the kitchen garbage.

Kidco’s magnetic child locks could solve some of the potential pitfalls of installing child safety latches.  First they attach with adhesives, possibly saving your cabinets from damage. Second they open simply with the touch of a magnetic key in the proper location. They claim the key will release the latch through over one inch of solid wood.

The best pricing we could find was $20 shipped for a pack of three locks with one key and key holder. Now if it only had a targeting laser…

Magnetic Child Locks [Kidco]
Street Pricing [Google Products]
Via Amazon [What’s This?]

Judging solely from what I can gather from the serial number on the headstock, my father’s Shopsmith — now pulling duty in my shop — was built in August of 1984. Almost exactly twenty-five years later it’s still going strong.

I mentioned a while back that my dad’s Shopsmith Mark V came to live with me on super-extended loan from the old man. Read: he’ll have to pry it out from under me to get it back. I left it be for a little while and started to read manuals and figure out what everything did.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maverick of Maverick Solar put the IkePak together to help his son after Hurricane Ike. He did not spend time doing extensive calculations, but just used what was readily available — he runs a solar energy company, so he probably has a few relevant things available — or easily obtained at the local WalMart. The wheeled Igloo cooler holds a marine battery, a 400W inverter, a solar charge controller, an inline fuse for protection, and most of the wiring. It provides enough power for a few CFLs, a small TV, and a cell phone charger. The total cost was ~ $360; the most expensive item was the $175 20W solar panel.

Additional pictures and details are the link below.

IkePak [Maverick Solar]

Those of you who happened to catch the Washington Business Journal yesterday probably did the same spit-take we did:

“Power tool maker Black & Decker Corp. will be acquired by hand tool maker Stanley Works in an all-stock merger valued at $4.5 billion.”

That’s big news indeed. We haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone at Stanley about this yet, so please take our reactions with a grain of salt. But, wow. Assuming B&D’s current brands — DeWalt, Porter-Cable, Delta Machinery, and (of course) Black & Decker — go along with the deal, Stanley will have established themselves heavily in the power tool domain. Some of B&D’s other assets, like lock and hardware brands Kwikset, Weiser, and Baldwin, seem like they’d fit in perfectly with Stanley’s existing product line. Others, like plumbing fixture supplier Price Pfister, seem more dissimilar.

But regardless of the final disposition of all brands and products, one thing’s certain: this acquisition will greatly affect a number of products you see on the shelves today.

Black & Decker Being Acquired by Stanley for $4.5B [Washington Business Journal]
Stanley/Black & Decker Site [Corporate]

This is a man with his priorities in order. Reader Lowside has finally figured out what to do with all that wasted space behind the garage door.

As far as I can tell, this solves two problems. The first is he never has to try to cram them back into a molded plastic container — a big plus in our book. The other is he gets to practice tossing them back onto the rack and looking casual. That way when his buddies come by he can look wicked cool with his mad wrench-throwing skills.

Warning: you might want to hold off practicing the wrench-toss maneuver until the other half is out of the house. Don’t ask how we know.

Toolmonger Photo Pool [Flickr]

Apparently available only at Woodcraft, the $90 Vika Quickbench is way less expensive than the $475 Festool MFT/3 (see TM 7/27/09), and 40% less than the $150 Vika Twofold™, but does it warrant a place in your shop or garage? It has a 32″ high, 30″ × 24″ work surface with a 24″ × 3½” opening vise and four plastic bench dogs. The Quickbench can hold up to 300 lbs and, when used in pairs as sawhorses, has a capacity up to 2,000 lbs. Two or more units can also be connected together to make a workstation or larger area bench. There’s a 15A, 3-outlet power strip with circuit protection in the base of one pair of its legs.

What do you think? Would this replace — or supplement — your trusty old Workmate (e.g., TM 8/26/09)? Let us know in comments.

Vika Quickbench [Woodcraft]

(TV Tonight, Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009) We think that’s a new Dirty Jobs and Disaster House tonight, although daylight savings seems to have driven the online TV schedules a bit insane. Also, we are coming to love Disaster House’s honest brutality.

All times are central

• Machinery of the Past (RFD-TV, 5:00 pm)
• Ask This Old House: Repairing Interior Door, Creating Privacy With Plants (DIY, 5:30 pm)
• Cool Tools: Top to Bottom (DIY, 6:00 pm)
• Dirty Jobs: Mannequin Factory (Discovery, 6:00 pm)
• Dirty Jobs: Camel Rancher (Discovery, 7:00 pm)
• Dirty Jobs: Tofu Maker (Discovery, 8:00 pm) NEW
• Disaster House: Smashed and Shattered (DIY, 9:00 pm) NEW

A reader in the comment stream from my post about Longacre Racing Products’ toe gauge asked about tools for setting the other two most commonly-referenced suspension characteristics: caster and camber. Caster is non-adjustable on the vast majority of vehicles. Unless you have a full-race car or some serious modifications, it’s never something you’ll need to worry about, since it’s built right into the suspension components. Camber adjustments aren’t exactly commonplace, but a few vehicles (like the famous Dodge Neon ACR) have factory-adjustable suspensions that allow camber tweaks, and you can buy aftermarket camber adjustment plates which permit slight shifts in a car’s suspension mounting points. For the amateur racer, more or less is generally all you need to know, but if you’re looking to repeat or record settings, you’ll need something like Longacre’s camber gauge.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s amazing how flimsy the best builder’s work can become under the right circumstances. The video above contains some examples of components you’d think of as extremely rigid, like the carbon fiber bodywork of a MotoGP race bike, turning into a floppy mess at speed. Components are designed to be just as strong as necessary with very low safety margins, and some of the flexion you can see in these clips is enough to make one nervous about the engineer’s grasp of mathematics.

Read the rest of this entry »

The folks at Lindow-White make a Rose Engine based on the Victorian-era model that allows you to apply the Rose Engine techniques of ornamental turning to wood and metal work. The Rose Engine is a type of lathe with a headstock that can rock side to side; that action is controlled by circular cams (called rosettes) that bear against a rubber piece. As the spindle revolves (the spindle is powered by a handwheel, so the rotation speed is slow; the tool is usually either a powered spindle or a drag cutter so the power of an electric motor isn’t needed as one a woodturning lathe) the headstock moves side to side against the pattern of the cams. A tool is held in a cross slide and brought against the workpiece.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eagle Tool Company’s sheet metal installation tool lets you pre-drill holes and drive hex head metal screws without changing bits. They build a hex driver socket into the tip of a sliding barrel, so when the barrel is locked in the forward position you can drive screws and when you twist the barrel and slide it back you can drill.

Eagle Tools hardens the hex drive socket to make it durable and they claim the tool’s quick change shank fits most quick change drivers, which means the shank must be 1/4″ hex. When you break the drill bit, you can buy a kit that comes with three replacement drill bits, an Allen wrench, and three replacement set screws.

Eagle sells installation tools both for 1/4″ and 5/16″hex head screws. I can’t find either tool for sale anywhere on the web and they don’t list retail pricing on the site, but I can confirm I saw the 1/4″ driver on sale at Menards for a little more than $10.

Sheet Metal Installation Tool [Eagle Tool Company]

Leatherman multi-tools and accessories have been a popular topic on TM (3/4/08, 5/22/08, 3/18/09, 7/7/09 and 7/24/09 to list a few). Well, their “original super-duty Leatherman is back.” The Super Tool® 300, 4.5″ long (closed) and weighing in at 9.6 oz. with stainless steel handles and body has 19 tools “for the working man.” The 300’s tools include “larger” regular and needle-nose pliers — which are really just different sections on the same jaws, but I guess you have to count everything to get up to 19 tools — file, saw, straight-edge knife, serrated knife, bottle opener, can opener, awl, and wire cutter for both regular and hard wires (the small notch at the base of the wire-cutting area is the hard-wire cutter). The wire cutters are removable so you can sharpen, perhaps with the 300’s own file, or replace it if needed. Read the rest of this entry »

Workholding in the Lathe by Tubal Cain (The nom de plume of the late Tom D. Walshaw) published now by Special Interest Model Books is a good small book dealing with an important subject for those of use with a lathe in the shop. The book is aimed at the model engineer and home shop machinist with a smaller lathe.

The book covers work between centers, faceplate work, general chuck work, the self centering and independent jaw chucks, “unusual chucks,” and collets, and has two other chapters on steady rests and lathe alignment.

What makes this book so useful is that it shows examples of all sorts of workpieces being chucked. Often you are faced with a puzzle when working on (and especially reworking) a part in the lathe. This book shows dozens of setups on odd workpieces as well as going into the construction and forces in various chucks and chucking methods. The books is somewhat dated but for most work, that isn’t going to matter in the least. The section on “lantern” type chucks is great for those that need to rework screws. I’m going to build one for myself soon!

The book is available on Amazon and from tons of other resellers. I paid $3.95 for my used copy a few years ago and it seems you can get copies used online for around $7-$15.

Via Amazon

All-Spec is having a 50% off sale on over 30 different Bucket Boss® tool organizers (tool bags, tool rolls, aprons, etc.). Three examples are pictured above: (from left to right) the Bucket Boss 56-pocket tool organizer for $14.43; the Pro GateMouth Jr. tool bag for $14.59; and the 22-pocket duckwear tool roll for $7.35. I suppose it has to be noted: the tools, buckets, etc. shown in the pictures are not included in the sale — tool organizers only.

Prices are good until December 31, 2009, so this might be a good opportunity to pick up some Christmas gifts, or drop some hints for your wish list.

50% Off Bucket Boss [All-Spec]
Bucket Boss [Manufacturer's Site]
Pro GateMouth Jr. Via Amazon [What’s This?]