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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   517 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for December 2, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Ran into another one of those "package covers 99% of my use cases, but god dammit wouldn't it be nice to have that 1%" situations. Not a big deal, but all workaround feel a bit ugly. Otherwise still trying to figure out if unifying local and external api views makes sense.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Got everything running again (turns out ChatGPT was right after all and I had a bad header somewhere).

Then I just played around with building a little landscape out of geometric primitives.

My project to get in touch with the Motherland's food has achieved some success. For lunch today I had a mostly-full traditional English breakfast. I say "mostly" because I hate mushrooms and cooked tomatoes, so I didn't include those, but I had bacon, chipolatas, eggs, fried bread (I think I need to read up on how to do that; it came out okay but I don't think it was as intended)... and black pudding.

It... wasn't as unusual as I was expecting. Yeah, it's got a distinctive smell, and when cooked it looks almost exactly like "unidentifiable food that's been left on the stove and converted into carbon", but it has the taste and texture of a rich meat loaf (which... it basically is). I can see why people might shy away if offered it (from the looks; the smell's odd but not bad), but yeah, actually pretty normal. You don't forget what you're eating, though; the smell bursts out in your mouth when you chew it.

Well, having a newborn in the house, I decided to finally get around to refinishing some side tables my wife and I picked up off Craigslist.

Living in Commiefornia, my access to paint strippers and solvents is limited. And I don't mean MC, I can't even get denatured alcohol easily. My first approach was with citristrip, which I covered with saran wrap and let it sit twice for 24 hours and it still didn't get all the finish off (and it's unbelievably hard to wash it off).

Some reddit research showed that everyone hates citristrip but few are willing to recommend something else. Finally I saw someone recommended Safenol (it must be safe if it has "safe" in the name, right?) which, miraculously, ace hardware had in stock.

That stuff is pretty good - in about an hour it lifted off a ton of orange-brown shit and cleaned up pretty easy with "odorless mineral spirits" (the recommended wash product was, of course, not available around here). The wood itself is a fairly attractive color so I figure I'll put some hard wax oil on it.

Unfortunately I've only stripped one surface so there's still a whiles to go.

Besides the finish some genius replaced the original brass screws with steel ones that are too long and poke through the wood. Luckily they're poking through the underside of a shelf so it's not noticeable, but I'll need to pick up some new brass screws of the right size.

For a flat/regular-ish surface like a table, you'd be frikken amazed how fast a steel cabinet scraper will definish -- you can get a pack of them for like ten bucks on Amazon and never have to deal with goo or environmentalists again.

I forgot to mention that they are veneered, so abrasives are out.

It's not abrasive -- depending on the nature of the veneer I bet it would work fine. Very little material is removed per pass, but once you get under a layer of finish it comes off like magic. I've mostly been using mine to get the 70s varnish off some gun stocks; you need to sand a little in the crannies in that case, but with a table it should be very little.

You can get expensive ones at Lee Valley and such that I'm sure are better steel, but I bought something like these guys, and it's fine:

https://www.amazon.com/HERMIT-TOOLS-Burnisher-Multi-Shaped-Rectangle/dp/B0CJRW4C66/

(More like 20 bucks I guess; inflation, amirite?)

It's an interesting idea but I think I'll try it first on a project that's not veneered. Would hate to scrape off the veneer and ruin these at this point.

Try it on a scrap of anything with old paint and you'll see what I mean -- it's not like a normal paint scraper, there's a burr on the edge so you hold it almost 90 degrees to the work and pull towards you with both hands. It does make shavings, but very very thin ones -- less than a thousandth of an inch I'd say? Much thinner that what you see in those Japanese planing contests, and easy to control by how hard you bear down.

Do we have any native Russian speakers here who might like to lend me a hand with a small creative project?

I tentatively volunteer.

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