The Garage Journal – Garage Design & Tools For The Working Man!

Amazon Prime Day

I should’ve done this earlier. I didn’t. The idea arrived late, like most good ones do, somewhere between loading the fourteenth box of tools into a truck headed for Colorado and remembering I still run a website. Amazon Prime Days. Three of them. Starting now. For the uninitiated: yes, I’m moving. Entire operation. Colorado. New mountains, new shop, new neighbors who have no idea what’s about to happen to their noise ordinances. It’s a full-on production and I’m running it at speed, which means the site needs its affiliate links clicked and its deals posted and its gears kept turning …

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Reviews & Features

The Porter-Cable A4 Worm Drive

I found myself at a buddy’s place over the weekend, pulled there by some vague notion of watching a man wrestle with history. He’s deep into restoring a house from the early 1900s, and for the last several weeks he’s been rebuilding solid mahogany doors by hand. That sounded like the kind of madness worth witnessing up close. The doors were something, sure. But the real story was the saw sitting on his workbench like a small, beautiful artifact from a better civilization. Tagged as a Guildtool 4-A, though the cognoscenti know it as the Porter Cable A4 trim saw. …

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Reviews & Features

A Savage Inventory of the Tools That Actually Matter

I was in the shop this morning, putting shit away where shit goes, and somewhere between the third coffee and a mild argument with a stubborn drawer that wouldn’t close, I started thinking: what are the real MVPs here? Not the obvious stuff. Not wrenches and sockets and the basic artillery that any functioning human being needs to get work done. I mean the things that changed the game. The things you didn’t know you needed until you had them, and now life without them seems barbaric. So I made a list. I thought about it for a few more …

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Reviews & Features

The OKnife U1 Utility Folder

I’ve been preaching the gospel of the EDC utility knife for years now. Not because it’s trendy or tactical or whatever the hell people are calling it this week, but because it works. Disposable blades just make more sense for the way I work and live. And over the last decade, I’ve probably burned through 20 or 30 different setups chasing something that didn’t annoy me. For the past five years, that something has been the Chaves Knives C.H.U.B. flipper, the black G10 bruiser sitting up top in the photos. It’s been flawless. Not “pretty good.” Flawless. It opens, it cuts, it …

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Featured Spaces

A MidCentury Shop In Scotland

My shop was never designed to be pretty. It was built to work. Every decision leaned toward function, and if the aesthetics didn’t quite follow, so be it. I don’t regret that approach at all. But as I’ve gotten older, and the all-night thrash sessions have become fewer and farther between, I’ve started to appreciate spaces that put a little more emphasis on comfort and atmosphere. Not above function, but closer to it. Which brings me to Nick Grant and his vintage-inspired workshop in Scotland. There’s something about the way he’s blended a proper working shop with a space you …

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