adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip based on inspiration from ted woodford and woodford
guitars one of my favorite youtube channels uh ted is a luthier i like to refer to him in my
own head as the cranky luthier because he does a lot of sighing and talking you never see his face
most of the time if you talk you hear his voice on camera like uh i really don't want to do a
bridge rebuild i just find his uh i find the way in which he delivers the beauty of his
craft with such a kind of a a world weariness to be very enjoyable and i connect with it
uh and i was one of the things i'm particularly astounded by about ted's work is as he's taking
apart guitars i did not realize until i looked at his channel how many different glues there are
used within the manufacturing of a guitar and how certain glues are used so that aspects of
the guitar's construction are reversible so there are fish glues and meat based glues
i'm not getting the names right and there are glues that you can undo just by heating
and he's built some custom heaters for getting into the dovetail of a neck reset
and heated it enough until he could get it to move i had no idea such a thing was possible
and so as i've been watching i watch all his videos about once every six weeks i'll
just watch whatever he's made and he puts out something fairly regularly um and this heating
aspect has been really blowing my mind he also heats like frets before he removes them sometimes
does all there's all of these ways in which precise application of heat on the guitar
yields some really interesting results and inspired by him i went
and bought one of these wood heaters and it this was uh this was like 120 some
dollars we'll include a link in the comments below but this is not what i'm doing the tool tip about
nope this because i clearly haven't used this i just pulled it out of its plastic this is a brand
new tool to me no my tool tip today is about what this is replacing which is this and you
may wonder what utility an iron has but i think that actually i might have already made it clear
that a household iron should absolutely be part of your tool stock as a beginning maker this is a i
mean you can go to walgreens buy a brand new one for like 21 bucks you could probably get one at a
garage sale for like a dollar and all it is is a metal plate with a heating element behind it you
can sometimes add steam although steam has come in sometimes for hat adjustment but for the most part
just being able to have a heatable surface uh is a huge thing and i've i've gone through two
irons here in the shop over the years of course you can use these for iron-on patches and uh
putting stuff on that uses heat but it's also a really great way
as i've watched woodford guitars do to soften things up for their removal or disassembly um so
this is a really really simple and straightforward tool tip in the same way that like a blow dryer
actually i'm going to extend this tool tip because i've already talked about blow dryers i did a love
letter to the blow dryer a few months ago these two you don't necessarily consider these maker
tools but they are and when you graduate and i don't mean graduate like you'll never use a
household iron again because i certainly use this thing all the time here in the shop i use it when
i'm doing fabric-based stuff a lot in order to iron stuff into the shape i want before i sew it
um this is just used on a daily basis which is why it's never not plugged in
but the the graduate version of this is clearly one of these a very temperature adjustable uh uh
heater with a shape that allows you very precise application
of that heat when you graduate from the blow dryer
you graduate to something like this a heat gun and again forgive me if i've already done this but
once you have applied heat with one of these when you want to get hotter and more precise uh
i love this dewalt and i specifically love that it's got a very low setting so i'm going
to finish this on the dewalt's low setting which has been really helping me out lately
so first of all it has temperature adjustment back here which is great
now that's a lot of heat coming out and to be clear a heat gun is such
that with that amount of heat you can actually set stuff on fire right here
that's how hot it can get but you can also go to a half position
you can also go to this half position and i really like this i've been using um soft
solder wire lugs lately where the heat gun anyway i've been using some products lately that the
the low setting on this dewalt heat gun has been absolutely perfect for my knee
absolutely perfect for my needs um and i love this sort of one-two punch the simple blow dryer and
the more advanced heat gun the humble household iron and the more advanced actual makers shop iron
and this exemplifies to me my purchase of this exemplifies my shop philosophy which is
use the tool you know you have a use for i did not have a use for this
until woodford guitar's youtube channel showed me what i could do with a more precise iron and
that made it reasonable for me to add this to my tool roster i saw the need
that's kind of how i advocate building your tool corral don't get something just because you can
i mean if it's a great deal and you pass by a garage sale and get one of these for 10
bucks by all means do it but i tend to wait for the acquisition of new tools until i see their
need thank you guys so much for joining me for this heated discussion i'll see you next time