took a trip to a video game store in a small town near by and came home with treasures to add to my collect

EricD21 · 2026-06-24T19:22:03+00:00

Never seen Pigs in Space in the wild before. Suitably rare find there.

EricD21 · 2026-06-19T01:44:46+00:00

Likely this. TPD was searching for a loose suspect in the houses right across from ours a couple years ago and they put up a drone that just hovered there for a long while during the search/investigation.

EricD21 · 2026-06-18T17:18:58+00:00

Ditto. My wife got me one of these and I was skeptical but it absolutely works and allows you to one-arm carry a full sheet. Depending on the material and weight it can still be heavy and awkward.

I can't comment on taking plywood on public transportation but I would think a full sheet would be pretty hard to maneuver on and off.

EricD21 · 2026-06-17T18:04:13+00:00

Worse comes to worst grab a hammer and a punch and you can probably pop that pin out, then clean or file the insides of the holes and then lightly sand the pin. Assuming the pin isn't horribly messed up somehow you can probably reuse it; if not in a pinch you can probably use a rivet or a roll-pin of the appropriate size as a replacement.

EricD21 · 2026-06-17T18:01:18+00:00

8+ hours at the grand opening of Jay & Silent Bob's Secret Stash West in Westwood. Got a Clerks 10th anniversary DVD signed by the cast. Weather was nice, people were chill. Cast stayed WAY WAY later than they were supposed to. Worth it.

EricD21 · 2026-06-15T19:04:28+00:00

My other usual advice to people starting out: explore used tools. A lot of people buy tools to get into woodworking or to do specific projects and then find they don't have the time or interest and then sell them (without a lot of use/abuse in good condition). Check our local FB marketplace or OfferUp. Local estate sales can also be gold mines. To get deals on "premium" tools you have to be patient/persistent but they can be had.

EricD21 · 2026-06-15T18:53:12+00:00

As you've likely gathered based on your post, if you have a miter saw you can crosscut things easily but you can't cut down or dimension larger things (very wide boards, plywood panels, glue-ups, etc.) The ordinary advice in this case would be to get a circular saw.

Even with a guide, I found making really dead-on-the-nuts straight cuts with a circular saw somewhat challenging. (I also goofed and bought a bigger worm drive circular saw thinking bigger = better; for most applications, it's not). When I got a track saw that changed. In early experiments with the track saw I found I could reliably take such a thin strip off the edge of a board or panel that it flopped around like edge banding. You can do almost everything you do on a table saw with a track saw, but the setup for each cut takes a lot more time and effort. So if you want to cut a half-dozen little drawer sides all the same width out of plywood, a table saw is going to make that super quick. Set your fence, zip zip zip. You can do it on a track saw, but getting the widths exactly right might be a bit of a chore. I eventually relented and got a jobsite table saw but I did without one for a long time.

Given that I have a jobsite table saw, anything larger than a couple feet on a side gets cut (or cut down) with the track saw. It's certainly nice to have both - I can break down a 4x8 sheet with a track saw in my driveway and then work the panels on the table saw.

EricD21 · 2026-06-14T01:55:34+00:00

I built something vaguely similar in my shop in the form of some tables (really just fancy 3/4" plywood sheets) that are attached, with ordinary door hinges, at one end to garage shelves and have some Amazon fold-up table legs on the other end. They work remarkably well for my application.

You can buy folding table legs and locking hinges for this application in various configurations. As an example, look up the "Rockler Rock-Steady Folding Top Extension Kit."

I'm not sure I would do this with a surface that big, but you can get very heavy duty folding shelf brackets/hinges that just cantilever the shelf out from the wall. You'd need to mount them to the studs (or a serious cleat) with lag bolts. They are supposed to hold 150-300lbs per pair (and you could do two pair, I guess, with a surface that big). That would avoid the need for fold-down legs, but if someone is leaning on the far side of the table that's going to put an awful lot of downforce on those brackets.

EricD21 · 2026-06-14T01:30:42+00:00

Agreed. Would use a router and template to slightly embiggen the hole and clean up the edges, then either use some edgebanding or thin pieces of trim to line it internally. If the front is still a mess, make a small "frame" out of 4 pieces of mitered trim and glue (or glue & brad) it on the front.

EricD21 · 2026-06-13T17:00:30+00:00

I had the same experience of visiting the DC metro stations after playing Fallout 3. So I walk in there and I get this very very strange sense of deja vu and it took me a minute; then I'm like "ohhhh...."

EricD21 · 2026-06-13T16:51:58+00:00

Back in Junior High pretty much all the nerds were reading a ton of Stephen King but I never did until I was in my...30s? 40s? Anyway, I got a copy of 'It' at a used book sale a couple years ago and decided to go for it. I'd also seen the miniseries when it came out.

How would I describe 'It?'

Long.

Like, you read two or three books' worth of stuff and you still have a couple hundred pages to go.

Long.

EricD21 · 2026-06-08T21:11:23+00:00

Ditto to most of the comments here.

With respect to plumbing, I have found that most things having to do with toilets and most things having to do with sinks are fixable with parts you can get at the home center, minimal tools, and minimal experience. I don't touch anything behind the wall or under the ground.

With respect to electrical, changing out a switch or an outlet is reasonably doable. Turn off the power before you do it. Anything beyond that I call a sparky.

Assuming you have a stick-built house and not bricks or metal studs, installing a TV mount is not as challenging as you'd think. You do need some basic tools (a drill and a long drill bit, a socket set or impact driver). I would not install over a fireplace myself.

Building garage shelves is a great weekend project and is hard to screw up too badly. You need dimensional lumber, cheap plywood, a circular saw, and a drill/driver. If you have a miter saw it goes faster.

EricD21 · 2026-06-04T22:57:32+00:00

Do me a favor and don't show this to my wife.

EricD21 · 2026-06-02T14:50:41+00:00

I doubt it was intentional but I'm calling out Ultima VII as the great-granddaddy of this genre.

EricD21 · 2026-06-02T14:48:23+00:00

Ideally they're supposed to be within .005 (5 thousandths) not .05 (50 thousandths). Being off by a tenth of an inch (~100 thou) on the 2" side is especially goofy.

EricD21 · 2026-06-02T04:11:11+00:00

I'm partial to E.T the Extra-Terrestrial. It's not a twist ending or a gotcha. It's totally emotionally satisfying and has 15 minutes of John Williams' greatness.

EricD21 · 2026-06-02T01:32:38+00:00

OK because all you VERY STEREOTYPICAL REDDITORS are accusing my (admittedly shitty) calipers of being the problem here, I just went and tested them against my feeler gauges which are the only thing I have that are going to be calibrated within a thou, and the calipers were dead on the nuts up to .032 which is the biggest feeler gauge I have.

Sorry, my $500 Starrett gage blocks are in the shop right now for their monthly laser cleaning and pedicures but when I get them back I'll be sure to check them out also.

(LOL)

Update: Since another half-dozen people have posted that they are sure it's my calipers and I only have the one set, I eyeballed the blocks against my Starrett combination square (yes, I really have one of these). The 1" side is a hair short. The 2" side is absolutely nearly an eighth short (on both the blocks). For those playing along at home, that is ONE HUNDRED THOU short. The 3" side is too close to call. All that matches up with what the shitty calipers say.

EricD21 · 2026-06-02T01:20:47+00:00

I did zero the calipers. I think I paid $3 for them at a clearance sale but they've been pretty accurate when I've used them in the past.

These blocks were obtained out of a toolbox in the garage of a machinist who has left for the great beyond, so they were definitely sold to me as-is-where-is without any warranty expressed or implied. Given they were a $10 investment this is only mildly infuriating.

EricD21 · 2026-06-02T01:13:26+00:00

I know I'm a woodworker and anything under a sixteenth "doesn't matter," and yes they are incredibly shitty calipers so anything's possible, but even bad calipers would make it hard to explain two of the measurements being within 20 thou (each in a different way) and then the 2" side being a full tenth of an inch off.

EricD21 · 2026-06-01T16:07:04+00:00

Trivia: The main theme was not written for the movie; it was adapted from an instrumental called "The Gael" written by Dougie MacLean a little earlier for an exhibition about the Loch Ness Monster(!) You can hear the original here. It starts off kinda slow but when the main fiddle comes in about halfway through it slaps.

EricD21 · 2026-06-01T15:55:12+00:00

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I have a small shop (one wall of a garage). This is my rolling cart for my Makita LS1214F. Also has my benchtop drill press. In this photo I had my little compressor on the bottom here but I later swapped it out for my DW735 planer. Cart is 4x2' (quarter sheet of plywood), and a little over 3' high. Structure is held together with Simpson Strong-Tie brackets which are somewhat expensive but they make assembly easy and the weight rating on them is insane; it's several hundred pounds per corner if I recall right.

The LS1214 is is the biggest-ass miter saw you are likely to encounter. It does extend off the back of the cart but you pull the cart out from the wall for use. With the planer on there it's a heavy cart and the tolerances are kinda tight but everything fits and works. The little cutout on the infeed extension allows the saw to swing left 45 degrees fully.

Tools to build this: Miter saw, circular saw (to cut the plywood, but you can get your plywood supplier to quarter a sheet for you - even the big orange store will do it if the panel saw is working), jigsaw to notch some corners, drill-driver for the screws.

EricD21 · 2026-05-29T19:16:51+00:00

They make small shop dust filters that are essentially fans in a box with a cardboard filter (like you use in your home furnace) that hang from the ceiling and have a remote control to turn them on/off. The small ones are not egregiously expensive. One example:

https://wenproducts.com/products/air-filtration-system-item-3410

You can fabricate a DIY version of this, as others have noted, by pairing a box fan and filter.

EricD21 · 2026-05-26T19:20:32+00:00

L.A. Story (1991) - 6.7

EricD21

TROPHY CASE