(TV Tonight, Friday, November 20th, 2009) We get Stud Finder tonight, where finalists compete to be the next DIY network useless host. Worth watching if only to give you another reason to hate the DIY network. We also get a new How It’s Made.

All times are central

• Holmes on Homes: Completing a Nursery and Bathroom Renovation (HGTV, 5:00 pm)
• How Do They Do It?: Space Shuttle, Rollercoaster, Pool Tables (Science, 5:00 pm)
• How Do They Do It?: Empire State Building, Extracting Copper (Science, 5:30 pm)
• Cool Tools: Classic Update (DIY, 6:00 pm)
• Dirty Jobs: Leather Tanner (Discovery, 6:00 pm)
• How Do They Do It?: Fighter Jet, Baseball, Sports Car (Science, 6:00 pm)
• Ask This Old House: Pruning, Hot Water Heating (DIY, 6:30 pm)
• How Do They Do It?: Rescue Services, Rotating Boat, Parachutists (Science, 6:30 pm)
• Top Gear (BBC America, 7:00 pm)
• How It’s Made: Playing cards, crossbows, technical glass, washing machines (Science, 7:00 pm)
• How It’s Made: Giant tires, movie cameras, glass Christmas ornaments (Science, 7:30 pm)
• Stud Finder (DIY, 8:00 pm) NEW/Stupid
• How It’s Made: Headphones, Diving Regulators, Reflector Light Bulbs (Science, 8:00 pm) NEW
• How It’s Made: Surfboard, stickers, sandwich cookies, concrete rooking tiles (Science, 8:30 pm)
• Deconstruction: Copper (DIY, 10:30 pm) NEW

Will lasers make wigglers obsolete? There’s a case to be made that you can set up your mill faster and with less fuss with a tool like the pictured laser edge/center finder. Move the laser beam to the edge of the workpiece and zero your scale. You can just as easily locate the mill over scribed lines or center-punch divots by aligning the laser dot over them.

The finder is accurate to 0.001″ and the dot size is adjustable with a polarizing attachment. The finder uses SR44 batteries that last for over three hours of continuous operation; of course you’ll probably only turn on the finder for short sessions, so the batteries should last a while.

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Specialty tools for a given engine family drive me nuts. Is it really that difficult to design something which works with thousands of preexisting tools? Unfortunately, General Motors didn’t do that with their Ecotec engines’ oil filter caps, which are so common that nearly every mechanic is going to run into one at some point. Ecotecs have an unusual cartridge-style filter design. Instead of a paper filter element contained in a disposable metal casing, there’s an aluminum housing cast into the block which accepts a standalone paper filter, and it’s covered by a plastic cap with unusual artillery-pattern threads and a 32mm male hex on top.

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Right now CPO has a reconditioned Skil 7-1/4″ Worm Drive Circular Saw for $99.99.

A friend’s Skil saw recently gave up the ghost so I looked around for the cost of a replacement saw. This seems to be the best deal, especially if their free shipping offer works and you don’t have problems with buying a reconditioned saw. The saw has a 2-7/16″ depth of cut, 15 amp motor (for all that’s worth…), a worm gear drive, and it uses a 7-1/4″ blade.

Skil 7-1/4″ Worm Drive Circular Saw [www.skilshop.com]

Deep.See.Bits™ are bits with marking bands every ½” (in the Imperial-sized bits; 10mm in the metric-sized bits). They look like they could be a reasonable alternative to plastic or metal depth stops and the ever-popular masking tape. I recently tried to drill some shallow holes in plywood using a metal depth stop, and the drill flutes kept getting clogged because the depth stop prevented the drill from clearing. M.POWER®, from Wiltshire, England, makes Deep.See.Bits™ as HSS twist bits for hardwoods, metal, and plastics, or as carbon steel brad points specifically for woodworking. All bits are available in both metric and Imperial sizes. Japan Woodworker carries an eight-piece brad-point set (1/8″, 5/32″, 3/16″, 1/4″, 9/32″, 5/16″, 11/32″, and 3/8″) for $19.75, but it can be found online for $12.63.

Deep.See.Bits™ [Manufacturer's Site]
Etched-Index 8 Piece Bradpoint Drill Set [Japan Woodworker]
Street Pricing [Google Products]

This is definitely in the don’t-try-this-at-home category, but this guy pulls off a neat trick. He uses a large screwdriver to change what I believe is the water pump drive belt on an old VW Bug engine while it’s running. The video’s only 33 seconds long, and the guy doesn’t even use that entire time to pull off the change. I can’t imagine when you’d need to change a belt that fast, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Try this with a modern serpentine system, and you’d find yourself in the ER with a five-rib belt wrapped around your neck, a few broken fingers, and a running engine busy seizing itself in the workshop.

The video is on YouTube, located through Streetfire.
Fastest Belt Change Ever [YouTube]

(TV Tonight, Thursday, November 19th, 2009) An odd night of TV for sure… We get a new Street Customs where they try to make a Lamborghini sexier? Then a new American Chopper builds bikes for a White Sox pitcher and Coleman Corp. At the same time we get a new How Do They Do It? about more stuff being done. The weirdest bit is the special, Family Armor, which blends Mormonism, car customization and firearms together into what will be either the best or worst reality show ever.

All times are central

• Junkyard Wars: Submarine Racers (Science, 5:00 pm)
• Cool Tools: Multi-Task (DIY, 6:00 pm)
• American Chopper: Ornge Rescue Bike (TLC, 6:00 pm)
• Junkyard Wars: Railroad Racers (Science, 6:00 pm)
• Ask This Old House: Mulching, Sash Balancers (DIY, 6:30 pm)
• MythBusters: Swimming In Syrup (Discovery, 7:00 pm)
• Street Customs: Lamborghini (TLC, 7:00 pm) NEW
• American Chopper: Mark Buehrle Bike (TLC, 8:00 pm) NEW
• How Do They Do It?: Military helicopters, metro systems, artificial reefs (Science, 8:00 pm) NEW
• Successful Farming Machinery Show (RFD-TV, 8:00 pm)
• How Do They Do It?: batteries, perfume and artificial islands  (Science, 8:30 pm)
• Family Armor (TLC, 9:00 pm) NEW

Our old friend Harry Sawyer wrote a piece a few weeks back for Popular Mechanics imagining five (funny) fake products that could result from the Stanley/Black & Decker merger. Harry’s mashup of Black & Decker’s campiest holiday gags and Stanley’s popular products result in flights of fantasy like the AutoFat tape measure and the AlligatorVibe AntiLopper — great for yuk value.

But what if you mash up these corporate giants’ home runs? Read on past the jump for five serious results we’d like to see from the merger.

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Few things in woodworking are more satisfying than making a perfect paper-thin shaving with a well-maintained plane. If you’re using a spill plane you’re actually trying to make special shavings called spills rather than trimming wood from a work piece. A spill is a long coiled wood shaving that was used to transfer flame, such as from fireplace to candles, before the advent of matches. Before finding this spill plane from Lee Valley, as far as I was aware, you either had to buy an antique spill plane or make one yourself.

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I made a replacement sight elevator for an air rifle the other day. It required me to undercut a groove in a tiny piece of plastic (1/4″x1/4″x1/2″). I found that I had some micro keyseat cutters (marked “Richards”) and gave them a try. Normally keyseat cutters are used to cut semicircular woodruff keyseats but they work okay for tee slotting and other slotting jobs. Read the rest of this entry »

A bit of a scare with a careless student at one of the university labs has gotten me looking for a flammables cabinet for my colossal collection of caustics and combustible consumables. At the moment, they’re in a tall bottom drawer of my roll cabinet. It’s fine for easy access, but poor protection from heat.

I was pretty surprised at how inexpensive small cabinets can be. The larger ones run north of a grand, but a 12-gallon unit retails for $270 from (and manufactured by) Global Industrial. Twelve gallons is certainly enough for home use, but even if $270 is less than expected, it’s still a nice chunk of change. There’s no doubt that they’re a sensible idea, but is the extra degree of safety worth the entry cost?

If you think so, Global Industrial and Amazon sell an identical cabinet at the same price. Shipping costs will probably be murder given the weight and bulk of these things, but they might keep your house up.

12-Gallon Flammables Cabinet Via Amazon [What’s This?]
12-Gallon Flammables Cabinet [Global Industrial]

Or, based on the picture, maybe this post should be titled Flashlights In Space! Now I like flashlights as much as — or probably way more than — the average Toolmonger, but the mPower Emergency Illuminator that I recently saw on Gizmodo is a bit much even for me. Porsche Studios designed it, and mPower, a wholly-owned consumer products division of mPhase Technologies, uses its parent company’s AlwaysReady Smart NanoBattery technology to produce a two-tubed flashlight with two standard CR123 batteries in one tube, and an unactivated NanoBattery in the other. The NanoBattery side has a minimum 20-year shelf life with no power dissipation until activation. It’s to debut at CES in January, and should be available in March 2010 for a mere $250–$300. For that price you do get a “high power” LED  and an accessory USB connection for charging cell phones and PDAs.

Think there might be something better in the next 20 years?

AlwaysReady Smart Nanobattery [Manufacturer's Site]

It may look like just another angle grinder, and the motor spec certainly looks similar. But this tool’s designed with one purpose in mind: cutting through masonry in a nice straight line. Fitted with a 5″ segmented diamond blade, it’ll cut up to 1-1/4″ deep — perfect for trimming up concrete, brick, or tile.

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(TV Tonight, Wednesday, November 18th, 2009) No new Mythbusters tonight, so there is absolutely nothing to watch.

All times are central

• Cool Tools: Lost and Found (DIY, 6:00 pm)
• MythBusters: James Bond Special (Discovery, 6:00 pm)
• Ask This Old House: Shower Valve, Recycling Batteries (DIY, 6:30 pm)
• MythBusters: Crash and Burn (Discovery, 7:00 pm)
• MythBusters: Myth Revolution (Discovery, 8:00 pm)

OK, so it’s actually called the Black & Decker V-3 Million Power Series rechargeable spotlight. But after a good 10 months of carting this sucker out for late-night grilling, hooking up trailer hitches in the dark, and finding a lost hitch pin in deep grass, we just call it the “vampire light.” It’s incredibly bright. In fact, it’s so bright it has a trigger guard to keep you from blinding yourself.

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I have to admit, I’m not entirely sure how these work, but they look like something from the end of Inspector Gadget’s forearm. They’re for precisely torquing large bolts in tight spaces, apparently mounting on the end of a long handle and accepting hydraulic feed and return lines. Unless I miss my guess, an internal pressure regulator determines how much torque is exerted.

If anyone’s ever used one of these, what are they like? The baddest torque tool I’ve ever used was a 3/4″-drive impact wrench, which is probably a pushover compared to these suckers.

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This might make the perfect gift for a brand-conscious tool friend this holiday season. This flashlight and knife kit (on sale at Costco this weekend) includes all the necessities: an aluminum barreled, xenon-bulbed two-AA light, a miniature AAA model, and an aluminum-bodied folding knife — and, of course, the Snap-on brand prominently on display.

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