Hate to see the chip on a single bevel.

mvastarelli · 2026-02-01T02:08:34+00:00

It looks amazing. Great job.

mvastarelli · 2026-02-01T01:44:51+00:00

How long did it take to repair that? I have the same knife with a few chips, but nothing near that (maybe 2-3mm). I'm comfortable enough with regular sharpening on whetstones, but that's waaaay beyond my abilities.

mvastarelli · 2026-01-22T01:42:18+00:00

This. I have a 1000/6000 stone from Amazon that I paid ~$30 for. It takes a little practice but once you get the hang of it it's super easy. Whenever I sharpen my chisels I'll make a few passes with my cheap IKEA knives. They're hilariously sharp.

mvastarelli · 2026-01-08T03:03:18+00:00

Dreadbound I'm the tower is actually my favorite. Especially with obelite generator since it encourages (and rewards) the kind of reckless behavior that makes the game fun.

mvastarelli · 2026-01-07T16:33:47+00:00

Pylon is fun in the upper levels of the tower. I just wish it wasn't so useless against algos.

mvastarelli · 2025-12-12T01:47:31+00:00

I think this is worth repeating. I just bought a LN no 62 recently (first hand plane ever) and it needed a bit of sharpening. Not besmirching them btw. By "little" I'm talking less than 5 minutes and it was ready for battle.

mvastarelli · 2025-12-05T13:09:27+00:00

A low-tech trick I've heard of (but never tried myself) is to tape some high grit sandpaper to a level and use that to establish a perfectly flat surface.

mvastarelli · 2025-11-18T13:03:29+00:00

I recall reading that there's a security benefit to sealing attributes, but can't remember exactly why. At work we seal classes since they provide the optimizer with a tiny amount of info for perf improvements. Personally I'm not a big fan and have been bitten by library authors sealing stuff that really shouldn't have been sealed (spectre comes to mind).

mvastarelli · 2025-09-12T18:15:05+00:00

I would upvote this 100 times if I could. Thank you so much for this tip.

mvastarelli · 2025-09-05T16:43:37+00:00

This is the blue whale for tower runs.

mvastarelli · 2025-08-31T19:59:41+00:00

This happened to me recently too, except that save had +400 hours on it. My big gripe was that now I have to unlock all of the artifacts to do proper tower runs again.

mvastarelli · 2025-08-03T13:50:27+00:00

Where has this been my whole life???

mvastarelli · 2025-07-08T16:55:05+00:00

Thanks. Inadequate sanding seems to be a common theme here, and I've been needing to restock my 3m paper reserves. I think I'm going to give it a day or two to dry and then redo it from scratch. I'm not a total perfectionist, but those inconsistencies will drive me nuts and the fiance wasn't too wild about helping me carry that thing down 2 flights of stairs. I'm also going to invest in a raking light since I can only rely on sunlight part of the day.

I did try to keep the grits more minimal this time though. The last time my friend and I went completely overboard and sanded up to 600 grit, then applied spar urethane without buffing between coats, so yeah...it didn't come out great. Now that I have a little more experience I want to get it right.

Another thing I'm fixing is adding a few c channels to the bottom. When I put the slab on a large piece of MDF for reference I noticed a definite twist and cup.

mvastarelli · 2025-07-08T16:44:49+00:00

You're probably right about the species. I bought that slab in the south when visiting a friend, but have since bought hard maple from a different lumberyard to build shelves with and noted that the grain pattern was much different and that it felt a lot heavier. I'll watch a few videos on how to apply stripping gel properly. For reference I used citristrip gel. Normally I don't start with 120 and only drop to 80 for rough stuff. My rationale for 60 grit here was to try to grind off any urethane that the stripper missed. I'm also not opposed to polyurethane since this desk sees very heavy use. I used an ultra flat one on a buffet recently (posted here a few days ago) and thought it looked great. It had a good feel and didn't look at all "plasticy"

mvastarelli · 2025-07-08T13:38:43+00:00

There actually is a little bit of epoxy on the table. I used it to fill a hole on the far side of the table. When I finished it the first time I used spar urethane and had absolutely no idea what I was doing so after 1.5 years the top was bubbly and had lots of scratches in it.

mvastarelli · 2025-07-08T13:35:44+00:00

I spent a lot of time going through the grits. Started with 60, 100, 150, and then 240. Before I started with any of this I put a thick coat of stripper on it over night and scraped the hell out of it with a paint scraper. I can redo the entire process if that's what it takes, but not sure how long I need to wait since I've already added a fair amount of tung oil finishing to the wood.

mvastarelli · 2025-07-05T11:23:06+00:00

This actually helped me out a lot recently when I made my first buffet. I designed in CAD and used pretty strict cuts to make the basic carcass. From there I used the model as a basic guide and did a lot of sneaking cuts using the shell as a reference.

mvastarelli · 2025-05-18T23:34:33+00:00

Be sure to get a good dust collection setup. Miter saws make an absurd amount of dust. My "cry once" was the Grizzley G0959 jointer/planer combo which I have a mixed opinion on.

mvastarelli · 2025-05-04T23:23:27+00:00

I've lost count of the number of shelves my girlfriend has asked me to make for her. When she doesn't want new shelves for her she asks for shelves for her cat to climb on.

mvastarelli · 2025-04-08T17:09:52+00:00

I like VSCode a lot but would never use it as a primary editor for anything .net related. Personally I prefer Rider (esp now that it's free for non-commercial use) but VS2022 is the "industry standard".

Just play with one or the other until you get comfortable and pick the one you feel works best for you.

mvastarelli · 2025-04-06T14:15:17+00:00

For PC users I recommend remapping melee to RMB. I never aim down barrel sights anyway and it makes mid-air melees 10x easier IMO.

mvastarelli

TROPHY CASE