Screen capture from the lastest I Like to Make Stuff video.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Do It Yourself
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Make it, Fix it, Renovate it, Rehabilitate it - as long as you’ve done some part of it yourself, share!
Especially for gardening related or specific do-it-yourself projects, see also the Nature and Gardening community. For more creative-minded projects, see also the Creative community.
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The trick to harbor freight is being patient and waiting for sales. They are constantly having some sort of sale, it's just different products on rotation. So if you make a list of what you want and then pick things up as they go on sale, you can get some really good deals. ...If you can get out of the store without buying $100 worth of other random stuff.
But random stuff is my favorite stuff.
It's also knowing that some tools don't need to be premium, at all.
The harbor freight parallel claims, for example, are totally adequate. They do everything a parallel clamp needs to do. Yeah, you can get clamps that are undeniably better from other brands, but why do that when you could buy 2-3 times as many HF ones instead? Run a piece of tightly-fitted construction timber up the spin, slather them with paste wax, hammer the nuts so the handle won't come loose, maybe glue a piece of leather or wood to the jaws and it's pretty much as good as anything. To say nothing of mechanically even simpler stuff like a basic spring clamp.
There are also tools that are cheaper to buy from HF than rent for a project. For a DIYer, even if the tool is worse, that's often the better bet since it removes a huge time pressure from your project.