mrhands
@mrhands

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


mrhands
@mrhands

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. ❤


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in reply to @mrhands's post:

The effort and setup required to cut all those dados for the tupperware rack. You're talking like a couple hours worth of work there. A jig, sled, or dado blade for the cuts themselves. A real table saw. When you could just go to harbor freight and buy a $10 parts bin with keyhole wall mounts.

The chisel rack is equally baffling. When you could just make little forked openings and store the chisels handle up? Far less effort to make as well.

For the router bits, the designer also included a pull knob? So I'm supposed to pull out those little trays with that tiny little knob. But I have to pull it out just enough to reach the bit I need. Because if I pull it too far it comes all the way out. I end up balancing this awkward tray of router bits with a tiny little knob between my thumb and index finger. If I manage to retrieve the bit I want without spilling them, I'm still gonna have to hover and fiddle to re-insert it into the tracks.

So, forgive me for going all Article on an at-least-partial-shitpost, but I don't really understand publicly mocking these perfectly reasonable designs that many hobbyists build and are satisfied with. It's like making fun of someone's pottery for being lumpy, when they aren't trying to sell it or put it in a gallery, it's just what they made for themselves and they're sharing it. What is gained by making other hobbyists on here feel bad about this very popular and useful practice so they go into shame and self-analysis spirals instead of continuing to practice their hobby?

People who already have a table saw and a dado setup (or the extremely commonplace sled which enables you to do it with a normal blade), and a drill press, and bins and bins of scrap wood that's just sitting there taking up space, can slam these projects together in like 20-30 minutes with no up-front planning. There are tons of people with "full" shops, and if you don't have one, then these suggestions seem as absurd as "simply cut four 2x4s to length" sounds to someone who doesn't even own a skilsaw. You don't make fun of a recipe for suggesting you use walnuts just because you don't have walnuts, you go "ah, I guess this recipe isn't for me," or you go buy walnuts.

Who cares if you don't have the same tupperwares? They'll last years, and if you lose or break them, just pull the shelf down and remake it, or widen the slots a touch and put it back up. It's four bucks of wood, and less if you got it by knocking apart a shitty cabinet you found on the street, as many people do. It's not "go out and buy $60 of plywood to house these specific tupperwares, then continue buying those quarterly for the next 10 years", it's "what do you have? make it fit together."

I would build that router bit holder exactly as-is, because I am incredibly bad at cutting angles. I would ruin 12 consecutive pieces of wood trying to get it right and it would only ever be "close enough." The pull-out trays seem fine to me, and I can cut the slots into a piece of Select Pine that's twice as wide as the finished product, then rip it down the middle and be assured it'll all fit together, without anything more than some rough pencil marks. I'd make the handle a touch bigger, but that's a great thing about making something yourself: you don't need to follow the instructions precisely.

I frankly don't understand the complaint about the wrenches. They come in standard sizes and every set sold in the last 30-40 years comes in a holder with one slot for each wrench. The value of that holder is that it makes it much easier to determine if you're missing one and need to look under the bench for it. If for some reason you keep acquiring wrenches you can throw the spares in a drawer or a bucket, but generally speaking there is a logical definition of a "complete set" which most people like to be able to visualize. Also, rakes with rotted off handles are an incredibly common form of trash; I have like three in my shed and I'm tempted to use this idea.

Likewise, the screwdriver holder is just... fine? I like it, because if you stick anything in the back rank that's shorter than what's in the front, you can flip it around to see what's back there instead of having to pull each tool out one by one to find what you're looking for.

I'll give it to you on the chisel holder, it sucks, but chisels are an unsolvable problem and nobody has ever found a good way to store them for easy access. You can't put them blade-down, you can't put them blade up, and if they're in a drawer then they'll bump into other tools, so you're going to risk dulling the blade no matter what. But then, it's just normal practice to be extremely careful when handling chisels, and an alternative school of thought holds that people are way too worried about dulling the blade and should calm down about it. The same argument has been had over the very similar hand plane holders people build and the consensus among the more seasoned hobbyists is "oh who cares, you're going to resharpen the thing every other day anyway"

These look absurd because they don't fit your exact needs, but the entire nature of the wood toolholder 'ecosystem' is that it isn't an ecosystem at all, you just do whatever fits the level of effort you're willing to put in and the tools you own. I got rid of my table saw because they terrify me, but I still have an enormous bandsaw; that means none of my solutions would be useful to you, since most people don't have enormous bandsaws, but also that most of the common design ideas online won't work for me at all.

That's my fault for getting rid of my tablesaw, then reading tablesaw-based recipes. It's no different than Popular Woodworking, 30 years ago, saying "cut a rounded curve" without saying "for this you will need a bandsaw, router, coping saw, scroll saw, etc." You're supposed to know what your tools are capable of, and if you don't have the right tools, either buy them if possible or find another design.

The saw holder is a problem, though. Oof.

I guess the difference is: did you do this project because you had a need and decided to give it the good college try? or did you do this project to take a photo of it and put it on social media?

Shout-out to the Gridfinity drawer system I made for myself. I laser cut it from MDF because I didnt wanna order plywood online, and its needlessly heavy as a result. I sized it wrong so the third column is useless, and it took way more work than a harbor freight drawer organizer.

Had fun building it at least!

Being able to imagine "I will have a complete set of chisels/wrenches/screwdrivers to meet all of my needs and then I'll never need any more" is part of the appeal of these things, I think

that and justifying your continued possession of the router you bought, used to make one table, and then left in the back of the garage for 5 years

I'll fess up: I've built the action figure cabinet, or a variation on it, when I worked at the plastic shop. since all our router bits were 1/2", I used a metric but that was like 1/20" bigger and that way they never got jammed, but were always a little loosely goosey in the cabinet. I put sliding doors on the front to keep the router snow out and it worked, mostly, but my goddamn coworkers would never close it. I was very proud of my work.

in my defense it was the best I could do in a super limited space, and it did keep the router bits from disappearing into a black hole drawer.

That's wonderful! ❤ I'm really glad to hear that this storage solution worked for you. Really, I'm just having a bit of fun with a shitpost. The sliding doors issue sounds like a user experience (UX) one, honestly. If your coworkers consistently failed to close them, perhaps they would have preferred a drawer instead?

I would have too, really, but it was one of those things, haha. gotta make the solution that fits the situation instead of what you wish you could have. and I don't think I had the chops at the time to make a sliding drawer setup.

thinking about this makes me miss working in that shop. making things is so rewarding, even when they're utilitarian. it's the best feeling.

ok but tbf, i use that style of tupperware in my kitchen, partly because that design does seem to have a lot of longevity, they've been selling the same ones for at least a decade so far, it's been easy to find matching replacements the couple times i've needed them

I mean you are sorta right on a lot of it, but several of these are great for my ADHD or limited space workshop. The swing out holder might be great for router bits at my table, as would the action figure cabinet with the ability to take the tray out and take it to my work location, as I will generally put the whole thing back if I do it that way vs just take the one bit, which will end up in a pile of things instead.

I know it is a shit post, but also ;p