Even if it’s not expensive, Is there a high quality item every serious enthusiast owns?
Or maybe it’s a highly prized holy grail item you’d give your right arm for.
Is there something you’ve had an eye on for a while and you’re just waiting for an excuse to treat yourself?
Knitting can be quite fun and somewhat low cost if you don’t get influenced too much. But ask any knitter about their stash and you’ll discover we’re all hoarders who will not hesitate to pay ridiculous amounts of money for a single skein of hand died yarn (in the ugliest colours) that most likely will end up in the stash and never get knitted. Tools are the same. Why settle for a very basic and fully functional set of needles when you can get the most expensive one?
If you know a knitter, just know they are most likely sitting on a small fortune worth of yarn and tools.
Knitting acrylic yarn on basic plastic needles is fun, mostly.
Knitting merino wool on a slick set of stainless steel needles with memory-free interchangable cables feels so nice I feel like I’m breaking a law.
For sure. But there are ways to make it more affordable and sustainable. Seconds, OOAKs, estate sales, unravelling thrift finds, etc. If I was listening to all the yarn shops and designers I follow, I would have a collection of 250$ sweaters! (I’m not saying I don’t have any mind you…)
My wife took up knitting one summer and now we’re stuck with this huge stash of yarn.
This is a highly contagious problem, and it effects those who crochet as well. I uh, got the bug and made this yard winder from scratch for my girlfriend lol. I use it too, when I get nice yarn in hanks, but it was wildly unnecessary.
Oops, here’s the photo: A solid steel yarn winder, mounted on a black walnut base with brass legs and sorbothane feet
I have electronically actuated (as opposed to cable actuated) gear shifting on my bike. It’s becoming way more common these days, though…but still, it’s a pretty expensive piece of kit for quite marginal gains.
Woah that sounds amazing, how much of the system is electronic? Is the derailleur itself controlled by a servo?
Front and rear derailleurs are servo controlled. These connect to a central unit that also has the shifters connected to it. This central unit can communicate with a bike computer (via ant+) to show gearing.
In addition, you can set it up so that when you shift the front derailleur, it automatically moves the rear derailler. You might want to do this in order to keep roughly the same gear ratio when changing chainrings. Or, there is a mode where you just shift up and down, and the system manages the shift for you, shifting either (or both) derailleurs, simulating a 1x drivetrain.
All of the popular group sets have a version of this: shimano, sram, and campagnolo.
It’s very expensive lol
Is it battery operated then or is there a vampire circuit from the pedal power?
WTF, first I’m hearing of this. Sounds really expensive. Is this a road bike thing? Sounds like a road bike thing, I can’t imagine the mountain bikers wanting something like that.
I have it on my road bike, but they also have it for mountain bikes.
In addition to shifting, you can even get electronically actuated dropper seat posts these days :)
It’s becoming pretty standard on the ‘mid tier’ specced mountain bikes. Anything with sram axs in the name. With that said the mid tier for mountain bikes jumped from 3-4k to 5-6k usd over the past few years.
Modern drivetrains are great but I love the feeling of friction shifters. It’s like driving an old pickup with a manual transmission.
For most power-tool woodworkers, it’s a heavy cast-iron table saw. Versatile, accurate, stable, repairable, adjustable, and powerful. Hand tool folks may not have one at all, or maybe just a little jobsite thing to rip big boards, and there’s a few people who think differently and either use a tracksaw or build up a custom work table with something smaller as its core, but the vast majority of people who are “into” woodworking will have a cast iron table saw in good repair.
I wish I had the space to dedicate to big solid table saw, but even just getting a job site table saw was an absolute game changer for me.
If you’ve already got some permanent floorspace dedicated, a cast-iron top Ridgid or Delta won’t take up much more at all and the current versions are basically clones of each other, down to their integrated casters. If you’re having to put the thing away as an actual benchtop tool, then yeah, something is a million times better than nothing, no doubt.
I have the job site saw… Setting up the roller stands to handle big rips is a pain. But if I find the space to build it into a proper outfeed table, I think it could be about 85% of the cast iron saw.
Yeah, going from no saw to yes saw is obviously the biggest move. Beyond that, going from an aluminum table jobsite saw to a beat-up but cast-iron “motor-hanger” import contractor saw (I spruced it up and added a fence roughly equivalent to the ones that came on the Ridgid R4512) was a bigger jump than when I was using the makerspace’s big 3hp and 5hp cabinet saws with Biesemeyers. For me, that first jump from jobsite to contractor is the move where the value-add is worth it and you’re not too deep into diminishing returns.
I’m currently on the spiritual successor (and possibly literal, depending on which factory in Taiwan they came from) of my “project” saw, a Sawstop Contractor saw. I think it’s the only one on the market that still has an outrigger motor, but I see no need to spend the money to upgrade any farther. The weight, the ability to adjust back into square, the induction motor (versus universal), the standard 27" depth and 3/4" miter slots, and the ease of adding supprt and fence capacity. Even staying out of the Sawstop argument, you get all of that with the jump to a Delta 36-725, or even an old Craftsman 113 (with SOME sort of upgraded fence).
I’ve currently got two vintage contractor saws sitting in my garage: a Craftsman 113 and a Powermatic 63. Both have beautiful cast iron tops and both have misaligned blades that I’ve spent hours trying to fix. I have PALS installed on both and for the life of me I can’t get the trunnion aligned properly. (Yes, this is a cry for help. plz help)
CRT monitors: the Intergraph Interview 28HD96, informally known as the “Carmacktron” (see picture)
A true 16:9 aspect ratio PC CRT monitor with a maximum output of 2042x1152 @ 80Hz. Not the highest horizontal frequency out there but an absolute monster in 1995.
Edit: Check out https://kbin.social/m/CRTs if you’re into this shit 👍
A really nice laminar flow hood for mycology. It basically provides a clean area so you can work with agar without worrying about introducing contamination or stuff you don’t want. You can make a basic version for around $100 (or a still air box if you can’t afford one), but a really nice hood is somewhere in the ballpark of $500-1000 for what is essentially a fan with a Very good hepa filter.
You could make a mushroomgrowers mag! You might be aware of this, but we do have: https://kbin.social/m/mycology