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The good old days come up a lot, when you could buy a house for a year’s wage and tools lasted a lifetime... Of course a lifetime was much shorter back then, so the people flouncing around with cheap Festool rubbish purchased after their easy course didn’t have to put up with the moaning for so...

Suction cup the drill onto the gate and use the same vacuum supply to pull the drill into the material like you would with a mag-drill on metal. Sounds like a cool thing to make, I’d love to have a go if time allowed. A university might find it an interesting challenge

You want something that is happy running for a long time (as you will take a lot of light passes) and fairly slowly. A mains drill is not that. Try buying an old lathe and using that.

Oh and “seasoning”, “acclimatising” etc. are all some weird way of saying “dry”

Yes, put it where it will go in the end if you can. Time depends on how thick it is and how wet it already is Aidan

Based on my recent experience with Makita, if you’d called them yesterday it would have been collected today and you could expect it back early next week, I really do suggest you try that option

Sounds like you’ve checked the obvious. Makita service are great, give them a call Aidan

Yeah fine, I mean you don’t need a day, a few minutes will do it. The flaming bucket incident I was referring to was one guy with an angle grinder, another with the vacuum hose right next to it... not pinch of PPE between them, the fire was probably the least harmful outcome from it

There’s nothing quite like the the plentiful flow of oxidiser that a vacuum provides to turn a slightly hot ember into a blazing inferno in double quick time. It’s utterly hilarious when it happens to someone else, but also quite scary in an enclosed space. If I did any more metal work I’d make...

Maximise diameter wherever you can (don’t exceed the inlet diameter of the extractor). Minimise length and changes of direction, use pipe over hose. That’s about all there is to it. Aidan

My drawers in the cabinet under the drill press are made this way, not pretty but have been fine for the last decade, cheap MDF sides and bases into shuttering ply fronts. They’re about 550mm wide and deep and carry lathe chucks, fasteners etc. So not lightly loaded. If pocket screws were...

Yep. I know a guy who works at a joinery shop making gates etc... 3 of them make several hundred gates a week and dip them on site

You can get sheds in dip treated and pressure treated. Dip is just that, the treatment is on the surface and you need to protect it repeatedly or it’s toast. Pressure treated the treatment goes into the wood more (ideally totally) and you don’t have to keep repeating it, but as it ages it does...

Yep, it’s that simple.

Some woods like oak, ask, elm with an open grain get dirty very easy, others less so. Ideally for us hobby workers we finish as we go as there’s no 2-pac sprayer waiting at the end, that keeps it clean and helps remove the glue, then final finish goes over the top. I’m fairly certain some of the...

New houses are not much better. Is it because of the risk of tools being stolen that builders leave their squares and levels at home?

There seems to be a competition going as to who can make the most wordy explanation for something very simple... your barrel isn’t strong enough (at least Roland managed it). Using hose that’s about 25% the area that the extractor is designed for will make your problems worse (less flow, higher...

All aluminium is oxidised on the surface, unless you strip it in a vacuum. Getting things abrasive media blasted and powder coated is a lot cheaper than you might imagine if you really like them. Otherwise I’d just rough it back with sandpaper and spray over it with whatever metal paint you...

In general yes for the types you will mostly come across, but there are hundreds of types of spring steel and thousands of types of stainless, then you can treat them all differently to adjust their properties, so asking for general properties of either is like saying “what’s the best food?” Aidan

Skirting off, then refit, everything else is a bodge. Some people like bodges, if that’s your thing, just fill it with silicone and add a huge radius.