15 Tool Tricks My Dad Knew That Hardware Stores Pray You Never Learn

Download my E-Book: https://gustanner.netlify.app/ My father could sink a screw into seasoned oak without snapping the head or splitting the board, and all he had was an old candle stub off the windowsill. I figured he was showing off. He wasn't. He learned it from a man who was already old when Dad was a boy, and that fellow never wrote a word of it down. I've been on the tools since 1983. That is 43 years. And most of what actually saved me money in all that time, no hardware store ever put on a sign. These are fifteen of them. Number one. Rub a screw across a candle before you drive it. That's the whole trick. The wax coats the threads, and the screw walks into hardwood like it was pine. My dad, Ray, kept a stub of candle in his apron pocket for exactly this, but a bar of dry soap works the same. Do this and you stop stripping heads, you stop snapping a screw off flush in a board where you have to drill the stub back out, and you save yourself twenty minutes and a lot of cussing. The hardware store would rather sell you a box of self-lubricating deck screws for eleven dollars, when a candle from the junk drawer does the identical thing to any screw you already own. Same wax on a hand saw blade, by the way. It quits binding in the cut and pulls easy through wet pine that used to grab and stall on me. I ran a dry saw for probably ten years before an old carpenter finally set me straight on a job site, and I felt like a fool for every board I had fought. Download my E-Book: https://gustanner.netlify.app/