I was waiting for a Cappuccino at a coffee shop and asked the girl making it to also give me a glass of water. An incongruous conversation ensued:

Girl: To drink or to smoke?

Me: Huh?

Girl: To drink or to smoke?

Me (the sensible part of my brain trying to stop the engineer’s part from concocting images of transforming the glass of water into an improvised Hookah): How would I smoke a glass of water?

Girl: Oh, sorry. You don’t smoke, right?

Right. So then the girl obligingly demonstrated, picking up a disposable plastic cup and mimicking a smoker holding it in one hand and flicking ashes into it from an imaginary cigarette in the other.

And so I discovered that following the draconian ban on smoking in public places, and thus the removal of ashtrays from the cafes, smokers figured that a plastic cup with a protective puddle of water in it can serve as an excellent mobile ashtray to use either indoors or (if they get chased out) on the go.

There is no stopping the human spirit!

A major cause of accidents and frustration is trying to use the wrong tool for the job.

Professionals usually know, and have available, the right tool. Amateurs and beginners may be blissfully unaware of it. When I was just starting into homebrew electronics in my teens, I actually used to drill holes in metal with a hammer and nail! I soon discovered the hand drill, but for the larger holes required for mounting tube sockets, panel meters, and such I had to drill a circle of small holes, then use a file to painstakingly smooth out the jagged contour this left. This is definitely the wrong tool…

I became aware of the right tools after maybe a year of slaving over those holes. First came a chassis hole punch, where you’d drill a hole as thick as your finger, and use it for the screw that connects the punch’s two parts across the metal; tighten the screw and the punch eats the metal like butter. Making the finger-thick hole was still a matter of drilling and filing, until I discovered the Reamer, a sharp tool that widens the initial hole in seconds.

Lastly, I found the de-burrer – a tool for removing the sharp metal burrs that might remain around your hole. My trusty metal files got a well deserved rest, and I could focus my time on designing better electronic circuits… and enjoying their realization in hardware much more.

Whatever work you do, if it’s hard and frustrating, if you’re not enjoying it, you may be using the wrong tool for the job.

Another thing worth knowing is how to test a tool before you buy it.

Different tools have very different methods… for example, I was saved from losing a lot of money because I knew how to test a Curta mechanical calculator before buying it (basically you start with all zeros, subtract a 1, then add it back. The readout should be all nines then all zeros again. This tests much of the inside gearing in two seconds).

Testing a hand tool can be even simpler. When I started into DIY I had this manual that had a section on hammers, including the paragraph shown at right. I used this test to select a claw hammer, ending up with a Stanley Hercules that has served me well through countless projects, and as you can see below it passes the test well. And if you think this is not very important, I can tell you that this hammer can drive nails right into anything without slipping or bending them, as a low quality tool often would; you supply the momentum, the hammer takes care of convincing the nail it had better go straight in. A real pleasure to use!

So, if quality is critical, how do we find the best tools?

One simple method is to go for the best makers; the ones the pros swear by. In my case I did that by interrogating my machine shop teacher in university, a master craftsman with decades of experience. Basically it went like this:

Me: what is the best make of hand files?
Master: why do you want to know? These are not for a hobbyist; they’d be too expensive for you anyway.
Me: Oh, I’m just curious.
Master: you aren’t going to buy them, Right?
Me: Perish the thought! I only want to know.
Master: You’re sure?
Me: Cross my heart.
Master: well, the best files are made by Nicholson; but you have to make sure it’s the Dutch Nicholson. Nicholson also has a factory in Canada, those are not quite as good.
Me: Thanks!

And then I’d rush off to buy some Dutch Nicholson files.

Those files serve me well to this day, though in all fairness, I suspect the Canadian ones would have served just as well…

Of all the everyday objects you will own, Tools deserve a place of honor, since they are the ones you use to make other objects. In fact, tools are arguably what distinguished our hominid ancestors from the animals. For my part, as a maker of things for pleasure and work, tools – the workshop kind – have been my lifelong possessions and companions, so I will blog about them for a bit.

The first point I want to share should be obvious, yet as the massive commerce in low grade tools shows it certainly isn’t: when buying a tool, always go for the best quality available. It does make a huge difference.

Take the tool in the photo: a machinist’s square for metal work. It was made by Moore and Wright of Sheffield, a maker of precision tools since 1906. Now the first time I bought a machinist square (I was in my teens), it was much prettier than this one, and had a scale of centimeters along the edge too; it only had one drawback: it had an angle just short of 90 degrees. So I took it back to the store and got another, with an aluminum stock; this one was just over 90 degrees. Eventually I went to a better store and got the Moore & Wright: no scale, just an ugly lump of iron that tends to rust – but it still measures a precise straight angle after decades.

Or take the saw in this photo. I had a cheaper one, and it would use the same blades… only they would pop off the frame every so often. Only when I went and got this more expensive one, made by Eclipse, did the problem go away – and all it took was to have the little rods that go through the blade be longer! Little details like these make a big difference to tool usability and usefulness – and quality is all about the little details.

And now, from the murky past, a serious lapse in designing for the intended user…

When my son was a toddler, many years ago, he had this habit of going into my den in my absence, climbing onto the lab bench and wreaking havoc (here, I once captured him on film reaching for a hammer).

Well, I had to protect kid and gear, and I had this idea to build an anti-toddler alarm system that would raise an alert if the kid went into the den without an accompanying adult. My design had two infrared beams crossing the door at different heights, and a control box complete with a cackle generator (to issue a sound like an angry hen when the alarm was triggered). When it was finished, I painstakingly built four lens assemblies for the IR beams, rigged them around the door frame, and prepared to have some fun. Cool, huh?…

Yah. The thing lasted for less than a day. As soon as the kid (did I say he’s very smart?) went on the prowl he spied the interesting new things on the door frame, decided they were worth studying, and tore them off the door to facilitate examination. I wasn’t in the mood to devise hardened housings, so that was the end of the project.

We tend to think of User-centered design as making life easy for the user. Evidently, you also have to ensure the system can survive its intended users!