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I have occasionally used my grinder for reshaping second-hand chisel and plane blades that needed a lot of attention and would have taken many hours to hand shape. It's fine with a grinder, you just have to take it slowly (don't push hard into the grinding wheel) and dip the blade in some cold...

I'd like it if Makita made an 18 V starlock-plus based oscillating multi-tool. I've got a mains Fein one and the tool attachment system is so much better than the ones with the screw up through the middle, so it would feel a shame to switch to that style. However, it seems a waste to invest in...

I've been relatively lucky so far, although I did rather stupidly pick up a piece of steel I'd just been welding to have a better look at it. It was surprisingly hot! When I was renting a flat many years ago, we had some contractors come in to replace the boiler. They had to drill a new hole...

I've got the Makita DRT50 (I think that's what it's called) cordless router and it's one of my favourite tools. I've got a mains powered 1/2" router as well, but since having the cordless Makita the 1/2" router has stayed permanently in my home-made router table. It came with several different...

I think the code is POPUPNOV15, not PICKUPNOV15 and it isn't everything on ebay, it's just a selected sellers list (albeit one with a few tool shops included, which is unusual for the selected sellers type of sales): https://pages.ebay.co.uk/coupons/2020/bvuw9/index.html

Today I (nearly) finished making a new stand for my two monitors for my home desk. It looks like I'll be working from home for the foreseeable future (and possibly part time for ever), so I thought I'd upgrade the stainless steel and aluminium ones I made a few years ago. The old ones can go...

The scientific symbol 'c' is specifically described as "the speed of light in a vacuum" - that's the thing that's a universal constant, not the speed of light generally. It's been understood for many years that it varies depending on medium.

I've got these clamps too (although I've only used them briefly once as I've tended to find the rubbery stuff on the bottom of the track holds it in place perfectly well so haven't felt the need for clamps). As I understand it, the Makita and Festool tracks are compatible with one another so...

Can't help you with exactly what you're asking, but for what it's worth I have several of the Axminster quick lever clamps (these ones) as well as some of the Bessey equivalents. The Bessey ones are definitely heavier duty, but the clamping action of the Axminster ones is lovely, they clamp...

You seem to be picking on one part of the meaning of the word "metrically" - the use of "metric prefixes" like nano. You can use metric prefixes with any system (look at the thou for an example - effectively one milli-inch). That is only one part of the metric system; another very important...

The second is metric† though. The number of metres in the length of my workshop isn't what I think you're calling "very metric", but the metre is. † In the sense that it's one of the SI units

I can use inches, pounds and suchlike (although I choose not to in almost all cases), but when someone quotes a temperature in Fahrenheit to me, they might as well be speaking Mandarin for all the sense it makes to me. Similarly the Imperial or American units for thickness of sheet metal or box...

I think I can count on the fingers of one elbow the number of times I've needed to drill a hole of a size that's a proportion of the width of a board. Hole sizes in most of my projects are dictated by what's going into the hole, not how big the board with the hole is. You can always come up...

It's my OH's birthday on Monday. She casually mentioned on Thursday that it would be nice if I made her some "pattern weights" for sewing (for holding down the pattern while marking out or something 🤷‍♂️). Basically some lumps of metal or other heavy stuff, somewhere in the 70-100 gram area...

Today I made (or at least sort-of-finished-making) a plank of wood out of lots of offcuts of four different hardwoods, all cut into equal width strips and glued together: It's a bit over 240 mm deep, about 820 mm long and about 9 mm thick. The plan is currently to trim it into a...

We live in Dursley, which is a bit more of a town than what you describe (and what we want for that matter - also thinking of moving into a similar type of place to you in the near future with a bit more space). There are lots of very nice places in this area that seem to fit the bill for you...

Copper plated steel probably. I think it's a common coating for G-clamp screws as G-clamps are often used for welding and weld splatter won't stick to the copper.

I used to use a SC2 (bought from Axminster). It came with an 80 mm 3 jaw chuck and a 100 mm four jaw chuck (on a backplate). I never had any problems with it at all. Having said that, I did change the bearings to angular contact ones not that long after getting the SC2. That was nothing to...

Yes the risk-averse tendency was one of the reasons I bought ZW3D rather than just using Onshape for everthing. For a while I used FreeCAD (which is free but not from a commercial company and does everything and more that Alibre could do when I compared them). The lack of top-down modelling...