My old Hakko FR-301 desoldering gun finally died after 6 years of daily use in the shop.

I tried replacing the heating element and pump myself, but the main board was fried from a surge last Tuesday. Anyone have a solid lead on a repair service that won't cost more than a new unit?

My old percolator gave up the ghost on a Tuesday morning... right before a 300 mile run.

It was a hand-me-down from my dad, probably from the 80s. The glass knob on top just cracked clean in half when I went to pour a cup. Had to scramble and make a pot in my little backup drip machine, but it just doesn't hit the same... that percolator had a certain grit to it, you know? Anyone have a good lead on a sturdy replacement that can handle being jostled around in a truck cab?

Question about identifying pottery shards from a dig site near Tucson

I was sorting through a box of what looked like plain brown pottery fragments from a site near Tucson, and after three hours of getting nowhere, I tried holding each piece under a strong desk lamp at a low angle, which suddenly made the faintest fingerprint impressions and cord markings visible, so what other simple lighting tricks have you found for spotting details on artifacts?

My uncle insisted we skip the switchbacks on the Timberline Trail loop

He said it would save us 45 minutes, but it was a steep, loose scramble that wrecked my knees. We ended up losing more time because I had to go so slow coming down. Anyone have a similar story about bad shortcut advice on a trail?

Honestly, I keep seeing guys skip the chalk line on subfloor layouts and it's driving me nuts

Got told my fantasy world felt like a grocery list and it clicked

I was showing a friend my story draft set in a made-up place called Veridia, and he said 'cool, but it reads like you're listing items from a menu.' He pointed out I'd named six types of magic rock in one paragraph without any feeling. So I cut it down to two rocks and wrote about how the main character's hands shook holding one. Has anyone else had a note that made you strip things back like that?

I used to think any old VHS tape was worth a grab, but a box from a garage sale in Phoenix changed my mind.

I bought a sealed box of 20 tapes for 5 bucks, thinking it was a goldmine, but after digitizing them, 18 were just recorded episodes of 'Wheel of Fortune' from 1992. The hunt for the weird stuff made me way more picky about bulk buys. Do you guys still grab every tape you see, or do you look for specific signs first?

My uncle insisted I use a paint roller to apply joint compound... and I actually tried it on a small patch.

My worm bin got way too wet and started smelling like a swamp

So I got a bit too excited with my new worm bin about a month ago and added way too many fruit scraps at once. I'm talking like two whole melon rinds and a bunch of soggy lettuce from cleaning out my fridge. I didn't add enough dry browns to balance it out. Fast forward to last Tuesday, and I opened the lid to a gross, wet mess that smelled awful. The worms were trying to crawl up the sides to get away. I had to do a full rescue mission. I took the whole thing apart, picked out all the worms, and mixed in a whole bag of shredded paper from my home office. It took me over an hour to fix. Now I'm super careful about how much wet stuff I add at a time. Has anyone else had to do a full bin reset like that? What's your go-to 'brown' material when things get too soggy?

Back in '05 we welded a 500-ton boiler drum with stick, last month we did the same job with a dual-wire rig

I was thinking about this job we just finished at the old Miller plant. Twenty years ago, welding the longitudinal seam on a drum that size was a three-day grind with 7018 rods. You'd have a guy preheating, another welding, and the heat and fumes were brutal. Last month, we used a new dual-wire flux-cored setup with an oscillator. The difference was night and day. We cut the weld time down to a day and a half, the bead profile was perfect right off the gun, and there was way less grinding after. The old way worked, but the new gear just lets you put down more metal, faster and cleaner. It makes you wonder what we'll be using in another twenty years. Anyone else made a big switch in their weld process lately that just blew the old method out of the water?