Pinterest is a great website to get inspired for your creative projects. And it even has good ideas sometimes! Unfortunately, it also has tons of bad ideas. Now that I've finally put French cleats in my workshop, I've been looking to add some more tool holders. And boy, did I find some stinkers on Pinterest! Here are some of the worst ones I've seen so far:
The Tupperware Rack
What I love about this design is that it's worse than a €30 screw organizer because you have to pull the lid off the cup before you can get to the hardware inside. But it's also worse than a stack of €3 buckets to throw your screws in because the rack isn't modular in the slightest. Hope you can still find these exact plastic buckets ten years from now!
Feasibility Score: 2/10 — A poor way to recycle your salad dressing cups
The Bleeder
At first glance, this tool holder looks like a great way to store your chisels. Especially when you have exactly four chisels. Imagine taking one out, though. You would grab it by the handle, move it up slightly, and then move it out, right? But if you do that at even a slight angle, the chisel, specifically the sharp bit, will hit the perfectly sized hole, get caught, and potentially rip the whole holder from the wall with it.
Feasibility Score: 3/10 — Nice plywood usage, but this is completely impractical
The Lazy Bones
What a cute way to store your wrenches! You just have to assume you'll never have to use that garden rake again. And that you'll never buy four additional small wrenches. Or one big one.
Feasibility Score: 1/10 — Even Five Minute Crafts would be embarrassed to call this a "hack"
The Rotating Stabber Station
This is a well-executed implementation of a questionable design. There's enough room for additional screwdrivers in the holder, so points for that. And the wood has been rounded, which is a great touch. But was it really necessary to add a pivot point to this rack? Are you really that desperate for 20 to 30 cm of horizontal space on your wall?
Feasibility Score: 7/10 — This is totally doable; you just... shouldn't
The Horizontal Conundrum
Hey, buddy. The boys and I have been discussing your "horizontal saw" idea. We love it, yeah., of course. But we were just wondering, have you looked at a saw before? You have? And you saw that they're usually longer than they're wide? You did? And is that why you decided to hang them... horizontally... with the teeth pointing toward the holder? Ah, it's an art project. Now I get it.
Feasibility Score: 0/10 — Try searching for "saw rack" on Pinterest and counting how many horizontal designs you find. I'll wait.
The Action Figure Cabinet
You know a design is Pinterest-approved when it looks awesome.... until you think about actually using it. How would you get one of these drill bits out if you need to use them? You would pinch it at the bottom and pull it upward, obviously. And then it would get stuck in the hole, so you apply a bit more force, and now it's stuck on the bottom of the next shelf. This is why sensible drill storage tilts the whole thing forward by about 30 degrees.
Feasibility Score: 3/10 — I guess the shelves are removable, technically
The Pencil Holder
Remember when you were a kid, and your parents would drag you to IKEA against your will? And you would retaliate by stuffing every pocket of your pants and coat with those stupid little pencils? But maybe that was just me.
Feasibility Score: 10/10 — Fuck yeah, looks like I found my next weekend project
This post is a direct response to @cathoderaydude's excellent comment on my original post.
Last night I spent around an hour writing up a shitpost to amuse myself and then went to bed. I never expected to wake up to 99+ notifications and even start some discourse on this here webzone maybe?? I have several reasons for making my original post, and they include me being a messy bitch who loves drama.
I'm learnin', here!
As a novice woodworker, I'm trying to get my footing in this hobby. While I started by watching others make cool stuff on YouTube, I'm now trying things out for myself. And I've discovered that many things that seemed cool on Pinterest are actually entirely impractical tomake once you know how it's done.
A common thread in woodworking discussions is that you always need just one more tool. One more tool, bro, and then I can build that cool side table. Just one more tool, and then I can finally cut a strip of wood diagonally. But in reality, woodworking is thousands of years old. You don't need a dado stack on your table saw to cut a groove into a Tupperware holder, but it's a lot easier than chiseling it by hand. A lot of the fun of woodworking for me is figuring out how to do cool things with the tools you already have. But that takes practice and patience, and that's in short supply on the Internet. So you end up with tool holders that require specialized tools to make in a reasonable timeframe and don't serve the user well.
The picture at the top of this post is the first tool holder I've made myself. And it's pretty average. The rack is made from scrap and can hold up to 24 screwdrivers. It has several issues, like how the cleat rocks back and forth. Or how I cut the top board at an angle with my circular saw, so it's slightly too long for the backboard. And how the backboard itself doesn't extend down far enough because I didn't bother to measure it. But none of these issues matter because it's just a silly thing I made for my workshop, and I'm damn pleased with it. It keeps my screwdrivers off the workbench, and I can quickly move it to another location or take it off the wall entirely. But you'll never find such a simple thing on Pinterest because the popular posts will be completely over-engineered.
Pinterest is a bad website
All of the pictures I found on Pinterest had no attribution. There is no indication about who made it or where to find instructions on how to build a tool holder, just an empty content blob in the void. This environment is horrible for novices because it encourages flashy photos over practical solutions. As many people have pointed out, you don't need to buy $60 worth of wood for a simple screwdriver holder. But Pinterest sure has a way of encouraging that!
We live in a Society
Here at Cohost, we say that Mr. Go-Rithm, "Al" for friends, doesn't live here. But that's not true. Even though all posts on Cohost are shown as ordered by their posting date, the people you follow determine what shows up on your dashboard. So if a post is popular enough, it will "break containment" of your social circles and show up multiple times as it gets shared by different people. All of this preamble is to say that this shitpost is one of my most popular posts ever. I wrote it under an hour last night and woke up to 99+ notifications this morning. And that's dangerous knowledge. Because if other people could see how popular this post had gotten at a glance, with a view or like count, they'd be encouraged to make the same style of post. This gets us in the same negative death spiral as other social networks, so I really don't make them too often. I'd much rather post about my own adventures in woodworking instead of tearing other people down.
Messy bitches love drama
It's me, I'm Messy Bitch. The unfortunate truth is that tearing down other people's creations is both fun and easy. It makes you feel good about your skills instead of worrying about everything you don't know yet. But these posts are not good for you in the long term. They're the empty carbs of posting. Teardown posts get a ton of engagement but don't make the world more thoughtful or informed. So I won't be making them too often. Because I'd rather completely rock one person's world with a post than leave a million feeling slightly meh. ❤
