Workshop Projects and Honest Tool Reviews
Garrett Dunn · June 23, 2026
5 Old Vises Worth Buying and 3 You Should Walk Away From Manufacturer spec sheets don’t mention what happens when you’re standing at a flea market table with a crusty vise in front of you, trying to decide in sixty seconds whether it’s a restoration project or a waste of truck space. That’s the gap … Read more
Garrett Dunn · June 22, 2026
Rebuilding a Vise Screw and Nut: The Part Most People Skip During Restoration You’re standing at your workbench, gripping the handle of a vise you’ve just spent the weekend restoring. The casting gleams with fresh paint. The rust is gone. Everything looks restored. Then you tighten it down on a piece of scrap, and the … Read more
Garrett Dunn · June 21, 2026
How to Identify an Old Vise: Brand Markings, Age, and What It’s Actually Worth Most people walk past old vises without a second glance—assuming they’re all equally worthless or equally valuable. Neither is true. Fifteen dollars bought me a crusty vice at an estate auction last June, buried beneath corroded wrenches and socket sets nobody … Read more
Garrett Dunn · June 20, 2026
Over on the left side of my shop, tucked between the chop saw station and my welding bench, I keep a small collection of steel stands. The oldest one’s been holding a cast-iron planter on my back porch for twelve years now — nothing fancy, just square tubing I picked up for pocket change and … Read more
Garrett Dunn · June 20, 2026
Don’t expect a rolling cart made from scrap to handle like the polished showroom versions — it’ll actually outperform them. When you’re working out of a two-car garage operation like mine, spending three hundred bucks on a store-bought cart while your scrap pile grows taller every month makes zero sense. Last spring, I finally tackled … Read more
Garrett Dunn · June 19, 2026
Pinned to my shop wall is a photo of a gate I built in 2018 that never got painted. The bare steel shows exactly what happens when you skip the finish work: rust bloom started creeping across the frame within three weeks of hanging, and by month two, orange pitting had set into the weld … Read more