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Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

This has a great auxiliary use for those of us who don't know about all the tools, and/or don't know the names of the tools. It's going to make me sound a lot less stupid at the hardware store!

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One of the great things about having a German speaking kid is the number of books that show all the entries in a given category (e.g. a huge book with hundreds of earth moving apparatus and the specific name of each)

In America I could only get close with farm animals and guns.

Could you recommend some titles? I not only enjoy German thoroughness, but I am also tickled by the schlamminvordstogezah style of German tool naming.

Sorry, kid has long grown up and moved out. I guess I’ll get a second wave when grandkids start appearing. But any bookshop kids’ section will have heaps of them. IIRC Gerstenberg Verlag was a good source, but that was a while ago.

Also the Was ist Was series had the best explanations of how real stuff (locomotives, printing press, sexual reproduction, etc) works. If you can’t find the books I’m sure some of the videos are on YouTube.

I'm chuckling a bit because I get this feeling of consternation every time I run into something that doesn't go very smoothly. For instance, learning I was using the wrong kind of hammer for roofing saved my wrist from breaking. I've been collecting woodworking and carpentry tools and teaching myself as I go. If you really want to develop some intuition for what to use and when then learn about the basics of carpentry and wood working: routing, planing, joining/jointing, sawing, drilling, gluing, sanding, and finishing. The difference between machine and hand tools often comes down to surface area and/or density (that may not be holistically correct, but it satisfies my bar for a rule of thumb).

I often find myself thinking, "I wish someone made a tool that would do X," and when X is a common enough task, someone probably does! I'm looking forward to using this resource to help me check if something already exists that would make my life easier!

> I'm chuckling

Ironically the picture of the chuck is a collet

Can't agree more. When we get tool or parts catalogues through work on the break room table, I recommend to all our graduates they spend time going through it, and to look up things they don't understand. Knowing the tool for the job already exists can save so much time and money, and while that genre of tool may change significantly, it applies to all fields of engineering.

Whenever I misname a tool I can tell my dad wishes I had never been born. lol

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