Workshop Projects and Honest Tool Reviews
Garrett Dunn · July 9, 2026
I own two angle grinders that cost roughly the same story but ended up in completely different places in my shop. One lives on the pegboard within arm’s reach. The other sits in a drawer, and I have to talk myself into grabbing it. After twelve years of daily garage work, that gap between “the … Read more
Garrett Dunn · July 8, 2026
Conflicting advice about tool priorities floods woodworking forums: some veterans insist you absolutely need a full power tool setup before attempting serious projects, while others claim hand tools alone will get you 95% of the way there. The first camp is wrong. I know this because I arrived at woodworking as a metalworker with a … Read more
Garrett Dunn · July 7, 2026
Last November, a miscalculation on a custom console table ate up three hours of my afternoon. The leg insert needed to slip into a socket I’d already welded, and my tape measure reading was off somewhere between 3/32 and 1/16 of an inch—close enough for horseshoes, not close enough for fitted metalwork. I ended up … Read more
Garrett Dunn · July 6, 2026
Spec sheets and generic cleaning guides skip over the reality that dull and dirty are two completely different problems — and shops like mine have to learn to tell them apart or hemorrhage money on unnecessary resharpening. The moment I realized one of my Freud blades had simply accumulated gunk rather than actually worn down, … Read more
Garrett Dunn · July 5, 2026
Standing at a welding supply rack twelve years back with roughly four hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket and a two-car garage waiting to be filled with projects, the question felt enormous: MIG, TIG, or stick? My research rabbit hole went deep — forum threads spiraling into acronyms, equipment spec sheets with numbers … Read more
Garrett Dunn · July 4, 2026
Everyone assumes that shabby welds mean your equipment is holding you back. That’s backwards. Rough beads, holes burned clean through thin stock, spatter coating everything in sight, complete confusion about what’s actually going wrong — I knew that frustration well. Took me roughly three months of banging my head against the same problems before the … Read more
Garrett Dunn · July 3, 2026
Over on the left side of my shop, wedged between the welding station and my main workbench, sits a rolling cart that holds more than it looks like it should. On top of that cart lives a 10-inch benchtop drill press, bolted down solid through steel plates I welded to the frame. Twelve years ago, … Read more
Garrett Dunn · July 1, 2026
Rust doesn’t go away on its own — and picking the wrong removal method wastes your entire weekend. Years back, I dragged a vintage Delta drill press out of an abandoned barn with rust so thick and orange it looked like it belonged in a geological sample. Standing in my garage trying to figure out … Read more
Garrett Dunn · June 30, 2026
Hanging on my shop wall is a photograph of a layout scribe I destroyed during year two—the tip snapped clean off because I’d miscalculated a line by 3mm, squinting under a single fluorescent tube mounted dead center in the ceiling. That broken tool sits there as a reminder that every mistake I made during those … Read more
Garrett Dunn · June 29, 2026
My buddy walked into the garage last week and asked why I was scrapping a perfectly good steel coffee table. Clean miters, careful layout, everything checked before I started. Except one corner was sitting proud by nearly 3/16 of an inch when I assembled it flat. The culprit? A combination square I’d bought for $8 … Read more