My best recent tool purchase...

Re: My best recent tool purchase...

Dean Lapinel

>That's a must for carpentry and useful in furnituremaking. Having been trained by an old carpenter who was born in the late 19th cent I have a lot of "non measurment" tricks.

Re: My best recent tool purchase...

thomd

>..Except the nailer."

That's like playing golf, except for the annoying ball-hitting part. Almost literally: you can slice, pull, top and pop a nail. I'd pay 25 bucks for 72 holes of baseboard.

Re: My best recent tool purchase...

Norman (Metcalfe, Ont.)

>Paul,

Can you elaborate on this "measuremment trick'.

I've never owned a folding rule, so I'm in the dark.

Norman

Re: My best recent tool purchase...

Paul Kierstead

>You just flip out the ruler until it is with 6" of the distance you are "measuring", and then slide out the bit in the first segment to the final distance. Then take the tape to the workpiece and mark from it. No remembering numbers, no mistakes. For inside measurements, I tended to make it a tiny bit long and then push in the tip until I could fit it in... the lazy way. Basically you use the tape like a highly variable bar gauge.

Re: My best recent tool purchase...

Norman (Ottawa, Ont.)

>Ah, ok..

I didn't know about that sliding part.

Yes, much like a bar gauge on steroids :)

Thx,

Norman ( who foolishly convinced himself he wouldn't need any new tools in 2007 )

All of Mine Had A High Mortality Rate .

George@Colonel's Workshop-Havertown PA

>Good Afternoon Paul,

I bet I've had dozens of folding rules. My Dad complained that I kept breaking his as a child. That action came back to haunt me, because my kids loved to break them. I'd buy the shortest, cheapest rule I could get by with. Now I realize I've been using the same one now for these last 10 years or so. In some respects a folding rule is like a thumbscrew: never loses its effectiveness.

George

Just as cats are God's way

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>of telling you not to be so attached to the furniture, kids are God's way of telling you that excessive attachment to tools is harmful to your parental soul.

Having said that, I had a drawer under my bed for my favorite tools when they were living here (for some reason, Phillips screwdrivers had a very short life expectancy when they were home).

Re: Just as cats are God's way

Greg B�tit, Vergennes VT

>I guess if I had to pick between knowing the wherabouts of all my tools and having kids around again, I'd have to go for the latter. Encouraging them towards getting a higher education virtually had the effect of banishing them to the further reaches of the world.

greg -feeling nostalgic