Good, Accurate Thermometer. I favor the Thermoworks products—their thermopen is consistently well rated. Their accuracy and speed can’t be understated. And if you don’t think speed is relevant, watch how fast your caramel will turn into charcoal.

Kitchen Scale. If you bake, convert to weighing things. Soooo much easier to dump, zero tare, dump, zero tare, etc.

Silicone plastic spatula(s). I like the Mastrad all silicone ones—keep several thick, several thin, and several “spoontulas” around. I don’t like the wood handle ones where the handle seems to come out of the head—strikes me as a nasty breeding ground for bacteria.

I like the generic SS amco tongs in 12” and 9”.

I’ve given up buying most small tools on CL—too much crap, too high asking prices, and too many stolen goods being fenced in my area. I still use CL for higher end gear—you can usually tell if a seller is someone who legitimately acquired a Lie Nielsen No. 7 plane based on a brief talk with them about plane use—and…

There are a lot of practices I’ll call out as dishonest, but this isn’t one of them. Part of what Craftsman sold was a transferrable, lifetime warranty. A warranty isn’t free, it is something the company factored into the sales price of the item when they decided to sell it that way. The economist side of me says that…

I’ve always liked the chart that came with my Polyscience SVP:

Old Bay. Great on seafood, obviously. But also on pizza. Eggs. Everything. Takes me back to walking past the old McCormack factory on the way to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.

French cleats for shop cabinets are awesome. Makes reconfiguration dead simple...

This kind of made me want to rip my eyeballs out. While I understand the basic if-you-use-your-tools-mainly-in-the-shop-the-blowmolded-case-just-takes-up-space idea, there are some very fundamental problems in my book:

My perspective on drill presses is slightly different. Frankly, while I have a 17” DP, it didn’t come into my shop until after most of the other stationary equipment and it isn’t something I tend to use a lot. In my book, a DP excels for two things—getting holes that are really orthogonal to a surface and repetitive…

I guess I don’t see the point of handheld router CNC. Creates a lot of complexity and ways the accuracy can be thrown off by having to deal with an arbitrary object in space. If I’m going the CNC route, I’d just slap it on a ShopBot CNC router table where I can control absolute position a lot more accurately.

I don’t understand the need for 16” tongs. I use Amco 9” and 12” SS tongs for both indoor and outdoor use. My grill is a 36” Viking, which gets hotter than hell and has a surface area much larger than most run-of-the-mill-bought-it-at-home-depot grills. I can flip stuff on the back (hottest) part of the grill with 12”…

Funny—I like the extra whitespace after a period from using a double space, but rigidly adhere to no spaces around an em-dash. Might, in fact, be due to MS Word, since it won’t convert a double hyphen into an em-dash if there are spaces before and after. And going back and adding them after the fact seems like a PITA.

I noted in my comment, but both MS Word (and apparently LH’s comment system) will generate an em-dash if you use a double hyphen between two words without any spaces.

I didn’t think you were supposed to put spaces around an em-dash. That is also consistent with how I generate 99% of my em-dashes—i.e., typing a double hyphen without spacing, which MS Word (but not LH’s comment system) turns into an em-dash when you apply a space after the word following the em-dash.

I was just noting Oxo had alternatives in the review itself—I’m happy with my very utilitarian Amco tongs. Not sure why, but I’m actually heavily biased against Oxo as a brand.

CI doesn’t seem to include the tongs I use daily—my metal locking Amco tongs (http://www.amazon.com/Amco-Stainless…). I’ve had both the 12” and 9” tongs for close to 15 years, use them daily, and they look and work as good as new. I find 12” tongs fine for grilling—frankly flipping things like a larger flank steak…

Oddly, there are two sets of Oxo’s in the test—one at the very top, one at the very bottom...

This strikes me as a decent resource: