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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2728 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 7, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Work was kicking my ass the last month. But that finally ended, so I got out to my workshop to finally frame a fun map I got.

The Algorithm thought I would be interest in Lord of the Maps, and I was. Purchased a nice map of my state around Father's Day. But I skimped on the frame. $70 for a frame? Fuck that, I can probably build one at least as good, right?

Took me a month to get around to it, but I eventually did. I didn't do anything too fancy. Milled down the red oak cause I had plenty on hand, I let it get out it's movement in my shop for about two weeks, but it actually didn't move any more. So I cut it to final dimensions. Put a slight 15 degree chamfer on the inside edge because I saw someone else do it and I liked it. Then I worked it with some aged barrel stain. I did also do some splines on the corners to reinforce the relatively weak glued miter joints.

A few things happened. My miter gauge must have been a fraction of a degree off, because the miter joints in aggregate opened ever so slightly towards the outside after I glued the whole thing up. So I guess I'll be recalibrating that. I calibrated it when I got it, but I suppose I didn't do a good enough job. The second thing that happened was the stain was slightly blotchy in a few places where I may have left it on too long. A lot of cleaned up well when I hit it with some mineral spirits, but some of it didn't. Oh well. Next time. In retrospect, I'm not sure I'm pleased with how the splines turned out either, and I might use small dowels next time.

The cost breakdown is insane compared to a store bought frame. I used probably $8 worth of red oak, the 16x20 glass pane was also $8. I used about $2 worth of hardboard for the backing, and then it used pennies worth of stain, glue and brad nails. So about $18 all told, versus $70 ish.

It seems to be that recreational indulgence in handicrafts, like wood working for one, is far more common in the US than the West, let alone outside the Anglosphere.

I don't know whether it's because of cultural factors that value self-reliance, more free time, large houses with more room to dedicate to things like this, or a combination of the above.

I don't know a single person in India who has a similar hobby, only those who do it for a living. Of course, we lack hobby culture to an extent, but still..

It's probably the large houses.

A lot of asian immigrants in the US turn their backyards into vegetable gardens and chicken farms, not exactly the least laborious hobby.

Is it just seen as low status in India? I know my wife laughed at me a bit when I said I was interested in taking a pottery class, because that's something only people making poverty level wages do in her home country.

Not low status per se, just not something people usually think of as a hobby. If someone with any respectable level of status did it, nobody would look down on them for it.

I had a bizarrely strong urge about ten years ago to build a cinderblock shed in the backyard. It passed, but the strength of the urge startled me; it was something I fantasized about for about a year.

If I were to take pottery classes, it would start with digging up my own clay in my backyard, to prep for a post-apocalyptic/post-collapse future.

I love watching the Primitive Technology videos on youtube, where half the videos are about bootstrapping your own pottery kiln.

Hardware Stores / Home Improvement Centers are very popular in Germany and being able to build (or extend) your own home gives bragging rights. The slogan of one of the larger chains is "There is always something to do" and a competitor has "respect for making it yourself".

Ads:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ryg3BCRH0Nw

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AKdc6xdNu_0

One celebrity, a sport athlete who won the world cup, made with his wife home improvement ads, eg doing their own gardening. I just now realize how strange that is, as in other countries such super rich stars would instead advertise that they have servants for everything.

Part of it is the traditional image that a "real man" should be skilled in using power tools and be industrious (and the feminist idea that women should be too). And also because manual labor is very expensive, it is cheaper to do it yourself "as a hobby".

Germans play Eurotruck Simulator as a hobby so I don't see why they wouldn't cosplay as handymen at home either heh

It's the space. Wood shavings and sawings are messy, you want a dedicated workshop even if you don't need large stationary power tools like a table saw or a jointer.

Even wealthy Americans still imagine themselves as middle class, as frontiersmen generalists who could get dropped in the woods and handle anything.

Even poor Indians, if they have vast caste imagination, think of themselves as Aristos above manual labor.

It’s the Scout mentality. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are all about being prepared, no matter where you are.

Makes sense to me.

My guess is physical space + wealth.

When I watch woodworking videos, I am in awe of the size of these guys' garages and workshops. Google suggests the average US house is 3 times larger than the UK's. Plus these guys have the cash to buy the tools and the wood, and a big truck to transport it all. Americans are just richer.

If the UK were a US state it would be the poorest or 2nd poorest. We are so damned rich in America and most Americans don't even realize it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/26/if-the-uk-was-a-u-s-state-it-would-be-the-second-poorest-behind-alabama-and-before-mississippi/

That's a crazy statistic to read. The fact that Alaska would be first by that particular measurement is also strange.

Wish I had remembered this in time for my effort post.

I think this does explain a lot of it, but I'm sure there must be cultural factors if it's not the case in other comparably wealthy countries. They do likely have smaller houses though, when I'm thinking of places like Switzerland or Singapore.

Speaking for myself, there is something mythical about woodworking. My household had items that grandfathers had made, my wife's household had items her grandfathers had made, I myself feel a deep calling to leave my daughter with some things I've made for her eventual household. It's like a totem of generational competence. Some proof that "We are people who make things". And it's a lot less ephemeral than the code I sling as a career.

I don't see any Indian making that claim, even if their ancestors had that as their own profession!

Not a knock against it, I'm sure it's a perfectly valid hobby if you're meeting the low standard of enjoying it. I'm just perplexed regarding why it's a rarety elsewhere.

Probably the lingering effects of America being a frontier nation once upon a time. Where self reliance is a virtue.

It's fading. That is clear as day. The learned helplessness I see all around me is depressing. People acting like any sort of manual labor or recreational competence is beneath them, and the only worthy use of their time is byzantine credentialism scams. Why be the chump making things when you are supposed to be ordering them around?

Rarely do I see any of these people living lives as lofty as their view of their place in the world. But that's a topic for another day, and thread.

There are some valiant attempts to reclaim the virtue of self-reliance and the dignity of manual labor but it feels like, at best, fighting a delaying action. Ten years ago Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) was invited to give TED talks or testify to the Senate about manual labor. Now the flavor of the day is just giving money to college grads who can't handle their finances like adults.

But is it really worth their time? You've admitted you're several hundred dollars in the hole, though you do have something nice to show for it.

I'm not claiming that as a general standard for hobbies of course. If just seems to me that barring some low hanging fruit, for educated professionals like the majority of us, it makes much more sense to pay someone else to do it and free up our time for other activities.

I can't say it would be a sensible decision here, even skilled labor like that is cheap enough nobody bothers.

Given my effective hourly compensation as an American tech bro: me building a new gun or retaining wall or installing recessed lighting in my home is wild profligacy or strictly a money burning hobby. But I don't want to live a life where I earn so much that I can "barely afford to sleep" as one poster wrote in a humorous story about a fictional rich man.

On some level, sure I could have paid a couple of nice Mexicans to do this for me. They recognize me at the hardware store parking lot and wave to me hoping that I'll hire them for the day. But I want to do these things myself.

If I gave the impression I judge all hobbies by strictly utilitarian rules, I can only apologize.

It's your free time, if you enjoy the way you spent it, who am I to judge?

You do understand I'm not literally hundreds in the hole right?

That wasn't obvious to me at all! You really need to lower your estimates for how informed I am about the costs in tools, space and labor it involves haha

Yeah, that was just in response to the hypothetical "what if you valued your time" question. It's interesting in the abstract, but useless practically. I have a salaried position, I can't just work more hours to make more money. If I did decide to slavishly min-max my time for profit seeking pursuits, it's unlikely I'd actually earn that much money in a side hustle or part time job. Or even half that.

If I did find somewhere that my more valuable skills could be brought to bare, I think my employment contract would actually prevent me from taking it.

Now the question of how long until the tools I purchased pay for themselves is an interesting one. The thickness planer I got has probably already paid for itself, or close to it. It literally halves if not quarters the cost of lumber buying it rough and milling it yourself versus buying it S4S or even S3S. Especially the place I get mine at that regularly has plenty of perfectly usable lumber in a "dent and ding" section. And let me tell you, S4S oak is expensive. It's the difference between paying $10 per board foot versus $2.5-4 a board foot.

My tablesaw I've gotten a ton of use out of, but deciding when it pays for itself is slightly more difficult. So far I've used it to build my kid a stool with a drawer in it, because she loves drawers. Also a box because I needed the practice. Made my in-laws a clock as a Christmas present. Used it when I rebuilt the rotted wall of my garage. Also made myself a bookshelf that was perfectly sized to go on top of my filing cabinet and hold my old game manuals. And when I replaced a bunch of rotted MDF trim.

Fuck whoever though MDF made good trim.

Then I built my wife a chair with it. And a garden. And a chicken coop. And a 3-bin compost.

Made a pair of cutting boards, one for us and one for the in-laws.

It's possible it's utility has paid for itself by now. It's been the workhorse of a great many of my projects.

My router table, circular saw, jig saw and miter saw are hard to say. I thought I'd use the circular saw more, but now I mostly use it to break down sheet goods. The miter saw I use all the damned time to rough cut planks, but I generally use my tablesaw to cut to final dimensions. The router table I've used for a lot of things that only it can do, or which just work better than a tablesaw. And the jig saw I've used to cut a lot of curves or sharp angles I wanted projects to have for decorative reasons that just were not gonna happen at all any other way. But in aggregate, it's hard for me to say these tools have paid for themselves. Still, it's a pleasure having the right tool for the right job.

In that sense, perhaps I am still "down" hundreds of dollars. On the other hand, I probably would have just spent the money on an RTX 3080 at pandemic prices, and blown a hundred hours in Cyberpunk 2077 instead. And if you are asking about return on investment or what my time is worth, that truly would have been money down the drain.

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Too much value available from actual work, relative to hobbies? If I had a stronger sense that the time I expend on hobbies could be directly traded off into significant improvements in my and my family's standard of living and prospects, I'd probably hobby less and work more.

It's not that we don't have hobbies, but they're usually not as involved, or certainly not as physical or craftsmanship oriented.

This is especially the case for men, since women tend to have hobbies here that would be unremarkable in the States.

Thank you for introducing me to Lord of the Maps: those maps are exactly what I needed in my life.

Lord of the Maps ever so vaguely invokes what I thought was a staple of nearly every home that was established in the 80's that I ever visited or lived in. An artistically taken photograph of the house when it was first built. Always with the color subtly faded, either by time or by process. And I remember in my profound summer boredom staring for extended periods of time at the one in my house, noticing how much trees grew, or which pushes had been taken out, etc, etc.

How much would it be if you counted in the time you spent? I don't know what the formula would be for leisure time you wouldn't be spending at your job anyway... say, half of your $/hour?

Counting my time? I lost several hundred dollars.

Nice work!

Given how many words there in your description I don't even know the meaning of, I think $70 may be not that wrong as a pricing point. I mean, you sound like somebody who knows what he's doing. So it took you $18 in materials and some time - let's say overall basic cost of $35? Kinda arbitrary but shouldn't be too wrong. Now for somebody like me who doesn't even know what the words used to make it mean, let alone having all the tools and the instruments and the materials and the knowledge of how to do it sitting around - 2x the basic cost sounds like not that bad of a deal. It could be a fun little project if I wanted to take up woodworking - and maybe one day I will - but if I want to just get a frame and be done with it, the price doesn't sound outrageous at all for me.

I can see this. But funnily enough, I didn't get into woodworking for it's own sake. I got into doing what carpentry repairs seemed at my skill level for the house I bought. Because finding contractors willing to do small repairs is borderline impossible because reasons, and the ones that are willing to slum it doing handyman tasks instead of flipping houses want an arm and a leg. So primarily I invested in a table saw for those tasks. Saving $60 on a random frame is a fringe benefit of having built a skill set to save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on relatively basic home repair tasks.

Same thing here for smaller tasks.

My dad wanted to use mosaic tiling to cover up a 5 concrete structural circular pillars in the new house. Maybe a five hours worth of work for a pro.

It's not the easiest or most approachable affair[1].

Contractors of any kind are hard to find in Slovakia, because the EU policy is to send anyone with IQ > 100 to university. And vocational schools were bad and have been neglected on purpose by the government.

And like in the US, they don't like doing the small stuff.

After about 1.5 years of trying to find someone to do this work.. it had to be youtube videos.

He watched a few on the exact process and we did it together in 2 days and the end result is mostly quite good.

[1]

I'll try to explain he process:

The tiles are tiny - about 1/2" squares of ceramic arranged on a flexible plastic square grid.

You use some sort of adhesive to get the grids to stick to the surface to which they're applied.

Then you apply grout to the grid and push it into the gaps, then you carefully remove excess grout so the grout lines are even.

That's really nice! I need to work up a better 45 degree stop on my shooting board, that's the only way I get the angles just right.

Yeah frames are mostly labor/markup.

You know it was funny. After I made it, and it was so damned cheap and easy, I did a quick google of "Are custom picture frames a rip off". Almost universally the results were "Absolutely not, framing is super difficult and technical, and takes a very trained eye." Random posts on Reddit by professional framers justifying how the average person should not, under any circumstances, attempt to build their own frames.

The internet can be a strange place.

Tell me about it. I was supposed to sand some stairs. I had no idea what I was doing, so I looked on the internet, and they told me that the weight of the machine was sufficient, the machine will do the work. After about an hour of “sanding” the same step, barely moving my hand, sitting there uncomfortably, I realized almost nothing was happening, so …. I bought another sander for my other hand. And only an hour of double drifting later did it occur to me that I was doing it wrong.

To be fair the internet advice is usually more reliable, or I’m less of a dumbass idk.

I have to ask, what sort of sander were you using, with what grit sandpaper? Did you have any sort of dust extraction?

Cause I can totally see you sanding and sanding away with a palm sander, using 400 grit sandpaper, with nothing but the bag it comes with.

Like this, but older and smaller. Part of the reason why I didn't put any weight or movement on the thing is that the paper kept getting away from the clip in the beginning (I fixed it early, but by that point I'd internalized the lack of movement recommended by the internet). Then I bought a triangular one, still small.

All 40 sandpaper. My even earlier attempt at solving the problem was trying to find sandpaper with 2 grit or something, but 40 was as low as they went.

So, there are a few areas where sanding will go wonky on you. The first is you have shitty sandpaper that wears out too quickly. I recommend sticking with 3M sandpaper. The second is that the sandpaper clogs up. All those palm sanders have a slight suction effect, but attaching them to a dust extractor will have you humming along effortlessly for hours if need be. And with the specific type you linked, that has more of a vibration mechanism than a scraping mechanism, I find I have to move them just to get the dust out from under them. I use them as a last resort when they are the only tool that fits into the space.

And if you are removing a lot of paint, I'd recommend a scraper first, as I've found paint gums up sandpaper even faster than normal.

But I'm a relative layman.

Yeah it didn't have a sucker and the paper was generic. I think the paint or lacquer was extremely tough, or maybe you’re not supposed to get all the way down to just the wood? Anyway, once I treated the entire machine as if it was just inert sandpaper and used massive amounts of down and side force, it worked okay.

Yeah, if it were me, I'd have used some sort of solvent to remove the paint or lacquer. My wife actually used this orange based paint stripping stuff to take the paint off all the countertops in the kitchen. Worked amazing, and it took zero effort with a paint scrapper to remove the resulting goo.

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I suppose they're addressing the average person, who doesn't even own most of the tools you used, much less knows how. For them it'd be a waste of 18 dollars (likely more since they aren't as efficient) to try.

Nice.

About how much time did you spend? That’s where I’d expect the store to take their cut.

Hrrrm. Maybe half an hour one Sunday doing the initial milling, then another afternoon a different Sunday to finish the project.

Have you considered using the QGIS program along with files from the Census Bureau and elsewhere to make your own custom maps? It can be reasonably fun (1 2).

Wow never thought I’d see QGIS on the Motte. Maps are definitely fun.

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