The reverse of a question I asked on here a while ago.
Actually 3 favourites:
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Brother Laser Printer - it really just works flawlessly
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Ninja Creamy - it really makes phantastic ice cream
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Coleman tent - easy to assemble, good quality tent.
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Steam Deck
Basically every Valve product and software.
have you not seen tf2’s state?
In Vavles defense, they proclaimed TF2 to be a “Hat Simulator” and I suppose they delivered on the advertised product…
It’s also 17 years old and still online
OG steam machines were the shit, but way ahead of their time. If it had come out with proton already, then it would have dominated. But it’s wonderful that the UX had laid ground work for the steam deck
It’d be interesting to see if you could install the Steamdeck’s OS on a Steam Machine.
Valve has not yet put in the effort to create a generic version of SteamOS because their focus is on the Steam Deck right now, but the community has.
Bazzite has been made to look and feel almost exactly like the Steam Deck and can be installed on any PC (AMD GPU recommended). Give it a shot!
The only Valve hardware I’m aware of and haven’t bought is the official dock for my Deck. I’ve yet to regret any of those purchases.
The game Portal genuinely lived up to the slogan “now you’re thinking with portals.” Soon after I started playing I’d be walking around in real life and thinking “if I put portals there and there, I could get from here to that building rooftop there and on to over there…”
I still regularly replay those games.
Wood glue, no particular brand recommendations, is one of the pew products I trust to do exactly what it claims to - glue wood.
Yeah. If it fails it’s the wood around the glued joint, not the joint iself.
A face grain to face grain joint will usually fail at least partially along the growth rings in the board(s) rather than at the glue joint, yes. But an end grain to end grain joint (which are rarely made for practical reasons) will typically fail at the glue joint.
Wood is kind of a composite material; it’s cellulose fibers bound together with a polymer called lignin. PVA wood glue is stronger than lignin but not as strong as the cellulose fibers, so a broken face-to-face joint will break along the weakest, the lignin.
If you edge glue a panel together for say a table top, gluing boards edge-to-edge, that board will be at least as strong as if it was one wide board; it will take at least as much force as a single board to break.
But, if you glue two long boards end to end, it won’t be as strong as a single continuous board of the same overall length. It will fail at and along the glue joint, maybe pulling a couple splinters out of one board. Which is why we basically never do that; if a board has to be spliced it’s common to add a doubler so there are fibers crossing the joint line.
But yes PVA glue like Titebond is amazingly good at bonding wood.
Titebond 3. It’s a pretty easy choice; it has one of, if not the highest strengths of wood glues on the market, and it’s water resistant. If you want the wood to break before the glue does, that’s the stuff you want.
That is usually what I go with, because I normally only keep one bottle of wood glue around and it covers pretty much any use case I could ever have for wood glue being waterproof, safe for indirect food contact, etc.
But honestly, for general gluing furniture together and such, even the cheapest no-name brands of wood glue have always done just fine. Pretty much any wood glue out there is stronger than any wood you’re likely getting the be gluing (inb4 some carpentry nerd chimes in with some rare wood that only grows in New Zealand or something that is stronger than steel or something)
I’ve seen plenty of bonds on furniture fail, rather than the wood. It seems most typical on things that are a dowelled construction rather than a mortise and tenon joint. I’ve seen it most often with chairs, since they’re under a lot of stresses. Maybe I’m in a uniquely bad environment that’s harsh on wood glue; I don’t know.
Yeah I think the way a lot of chairs are constructed is just a bad use case for glue. Like you said, chairs are under a lot of stress (tension, compression, shear, cleavage, peel- glue can handle some of these well and others not,) there’s a lot of weird ways you can put leverage on the joints, people don’t tend to sit perfectly still so those loads are dynamic and always shifting a bit, and to make it worse they kind of have to be designed to be somewhat lightweight, easy to move around, small enough to fit under a table, etc so there’s always some compromises made and they’re never as overbuilt as they probably should be.
Different kind of construction, but I work in a 911 dispatch center, we have some ridiculously overbuilt chairs that are supposed to be rated for someone to be occupying them 24/7. They cost a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still breaking in new and spectacular ways almost constantly. It’s tough to build a good chair.
There’s also of course issues that can arise from bad surface prep, poor fitment, improper clamping, too little glue, not letting it dry long enough too high/low temperature/humidity/moisture, the wood shrinking/expanding, poorly thought-out joints that don’t have enough surface area or are putting the glue under the wrong kind of stresses, and of course sometimes you’re asking the glue to do something it doesn’t do well, it’s good at gluing wood to wood, but not nearly as good at gluing paint to paint or varnish to varnish.
Totally agree.
Unfortunately, wooden chairs that don’t suck tend to cost a fuckton. The styles that people tend to like are usually on the fragile side by their nature.
Chairs, like wooden dining room chairs, are some of the most dynamically stressed woodworking projects. A bookcase may carry hundreds of pounds of books but you put the books on the shelf and they mostly just stay there. A dining room chair has people sitting down, scooting forward, shifting around, leaning back, standing up etc. so there’s a lot of force moving around trying to bend the frame members and shift the tenons around in their mortises. This often causes the glue, or the wood immediately around it, to fracture under repetitive stress and causes loose joints.
Some woodworkers prefer to use hide glue (or its modern synthetic equivalent) rather than PVA glue specifically because it isn’t as strong, and because the bond can be released with heat. That allows the glue to fail while the wood itself remains intact, and then a chair with a failed joint can be disassembled and repaired. A chair assembled with PVA is likely to break in the middle of a board or dowel and is impossible to disassemble in any intentional way.
Wood glues like Titebond are PVA-based glues. So is Elmer’s white school glue, which is also very good at bonding wood. Wood glues are yellow either because of added resins that make it tackier when wet so clamped boards don’t slide around as easy before the glue dries, so that the glue dries to a harder, more rock-like consistency rather than staying slightly flexible, or because wood is kind of yellow so they wanted it to look like wood, I’ve heard all three and I’m not sure which is true. Titebond does sell a brown wood glue so that it blends into darker woods like walnut and ebony though.
I wonder if there is any bad wood glue out there. I use it quite a bit and I don’t think i ever used the same brand twice.
For some reason I have a thought in my head that I don’t like Elmer’s wood glue. I don’t know why, I don’t remember it ever letting me down.
White Elmer’s glue is pretty much the same formula as their “washable” school glue. It bonds wood quite strongly but it tends to be slimier than wood glue so when you go to clamp the boards together they tend to slip around out of orientation. It’s not as fun to work with as yellow carpenter’s glues which tend to be tackier so the boards don’t slip around as much.
My latest bottle is gorilla and it works well enough. But exactly like you said, I don’t think I could pick it out from every other bottle I’ve used in the last 20 years.
Head-On CAN be appied directly to the forehead! Which was it’s only claim.
I was given a small food processor and a small bullet blender a decade ago and I still use them monthly.
I have a full size brevelle food processor that gets less use.
My MacBook air… Apple bad and all, but the battery life and (CPU) performance meet the claims…
Yes, Apple have become a steaming tower of shitheads, but fuck me, their hardware is (generally) incredibly well built.
I have a 2011 13” MacBook Pro that I bumped up to 16gb RAM, and replaced the DVD drive with a second hard drive. I had it running Sonoma through OCLP until a few weeks ago when I threw Linux Mint on it. Damn thing won’t die. Same for the 2011 and 2014 Macs mini that I also use regularly. I also have a 15” M2 Air, which is legitimately the best computer I’ve ever owned. I don’t imagine I’ll get the same life out of that, not with macOS at least. Asahi Linux seems to be very, very promising though.
Louis Rossman enters the chat.
Same with my early-2015 model MacBook Pro. My only Apple product. It just works, what can I say. I’m basically waiting for a reason to switch to the Framework laptop but we’ll see. I might eventually just get another MacBook. I gifted my SO a MacBook air around the same time I bought mine and she has had zero issues with that as well.
I had the same 2015 MBP, and honestly the only reason I sold it was because I was gifted an M2 Air. For the £400 I paid for it, it’s an incredible laptop.
I got this M3 air earlier this year… It’s also my only apple product and so far it’s been great. 0 driver issues, 0 slowdown, 0 screwing around. It just works…
The one apple product I’m willing to buy.
I feel like other brands have closed the gap but there was a time where macbooks seemed like the only great laptop on the market.
IMO:
Early 2000 -> 2014 - MacBooks are great
2014 -> 2016 - MacBooks are decent
2016 -> Last Intel Models - MacBooks are bad
M1 -> Present - MacBooks are great
Currently using my 2011 MacBook Pro! It’s got 16GB of RAM and I’ve replaced the optical drive with a SSD, but it still browses the web and handles sorting and browsing and editing 80k photos!
I put Linux Mint on mine. It’s like a brand new laptop. Incredible hardware.
Ugh I would LOVE that, but I need OSX for iPhoto, it’s so amazing for organizing a million photos…
Not the 8GB RAM model tho, too low for 2020…
Mine’s an 8GB. At least for my use case (web development/design) it’s plenty…
Miele washing machine. Doing my laundry since 2001 and still as good as new.
Fender Telecaster
Similarly, Fender Precision Bass. Hard to go wrong with a classic.
There was a mobile game app that claimed that it actually is the game it is claiming to be(one of the generic mobile ad games)
It actually was the game it was claiming to be*
*every several levels of a different game, the promoted game was just a minigame
Blundstone boots, they look great and last forever.
I tasted the rainbow 🌈
I knew someone who did that at a rave in the 90s. I had to make sure they stayed really hydrated for the rest of the night.
Darn tough socks, lamy pens, Ibanez guitars, and crumpler bags have all been very solid quality products I consider well worth the value.
Second Darn Tough. Best trail running socks I’ve ever had
I have a Lamy pen and it’s wonderful. I put a more fine nib on it and it writes beautifully, despite me being a lefty. I know you can get a lefty nib for them, but can’t really justify buying one and they only come in medium width.
i had like 10 of them since childhod, goddamn loved them. loved the colors and how smooth they were.
Have an Al-Star and a Safari with two of my favorite inks close at hand nearly always. Can’t remember the last time I so much as thought about cleaning either, even the one with a shimmer in it. I just keep refilling them, and they just keep working.
Dirt cheap, given the quality, too, IMHO. They could charge twice what they do for the lower end of their products, and there would still be value there.
Timex: Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
I licked my watch when I was a kid and it kept on ticking.
Instant pot. I mostly use it for batch cooking, making homemade stocks and rice now. But, I used to make yoghurt in it weekly and proof dough in it every 3 days or so.
It advertised a bunch of functions and it only sucks at slow cooking, but pressure cooking is faster and better imo, it does suck at slow cooking though.
I have a different brand of multicooker, and it’s excellent. The “boil” function goes down as low as 40C so I use it to sous vide things fairly often
Evaporust. Incredible product and reusable so many times.
