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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

Dover and Dover and Dover Again

I would prefer to be more positive in my observations about life in general on this blog, but life isn’t often cooperative these days. So you’re fed a steady diet of mordant remarks from me, mostly. Snark. I try to be (act) bemused mostly. That’s not a recipe for big success on these here interwebs. The intertunnel is essentially dedicated to being nasty. “Everyone is a small h Hitler and here’s why” is the internet’s business plan.

It’s long since become a fool’s errand to try to find anyone on the Toob who is doing sensible construction work of any kind. That goes double for furniture. Everyone is as crazy as the raccoon-eyed serial snouthouse-farmhouse barn-door  defacer pictured in the title image for the following video. The man who made the video is a different story.

This guy is trying. He’s made a very small discovery, even though it seems earth shaking to him. There is no useful information on the internet for him, at least anywhere he knows where to look. He has, egad, cracked a book or two and discovered there’s info in them there book stacks. Good for him.

I’ve seen several of his videos. I think he shows a commendable amount of curiosity, effort, and common sense that’s pretty rare on the Toob. He’s got half-a-million subscribers to his channel, so the Toob is sending people his way. They all think he’s the love child of Vitruvius and Norm Abram. He’s hardly that. But what you’re seeing is the honest search for answers in a world that hides them from you in a morass of meta information. He wants to learn, but he doesn’t know where or how to find help.

He makes the kinds of errors I expect with the internet autodidact. In times past, someone with more experience would steer guys like him away from obvious mistakes they’ve encountered and learned from in the past. I saw him nailing red cedar clapboards on an expensive house using a butane cordless finish nailer. That one made my eye twitch. But I had the urge to help him, not excoriate him. Dude, hot dipped galvanized box nails driven with the heads in contact, but not countersunk, is the answer. And prime the claps, front and back, before you put them up. Saying “the painter will fix that” is bad carpentry.

Now I’m really going to help him, even though he’ll never see this, because he’d have to wade through thirty thousand miles of Home&Garden drivel to get here. But here goes. Dover Publications.

Your local library isn’t going to help you here. They’re only interested in how many mommies Heather has at this point. You’re going to have to spend coin and hunt around to build your own library of useful information. Dover Publications is like a cheat code. They’ve got lots of interesting and useful stuff.

You’ll learn another hard lesson, though, as you accumulate books. Most books about architecture, carpentry, HVAC, plumbing, electrical work, site work, engineering, you name it, have only a few pages of trenchant stuff in each one. Like Toob videos, the covers are often come-ons that don’t deliver much. You’re going to have to get a lot of books. Viz:

There’s a good starter set from my office. And I don’t want to discourage you, but I have four more shelves just like it, and boxes of books in walk in closets, too. But you’re on the right track with your mini library.

If I were you, I’d start the same way I did. I made all the bookshelves.

3 Responses

  1. My personal hobbyhorses are electrical and mechanical engineering.
    It’s depressing how hard it is to get to the actual piece of info you’re trying to get at. That and how many bad approaches are copied from book to book, by cut and paste I suppose.

    (BTW, the ‘Dictionary of American Slang’? zoikkees)

  2. Dover books are also (at least they used to be) printed the same way hardcover books used to be: actual sewn bindings, so they lasted indefinitely. It really chaps me when your new hardcover book starts dropping pages on the second reading, like used to be limited to those 10 cent pulp westerns.

    Another good source is Audel’s.

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