Bonk! Flashlight Smack-Down On The Farm

Remember your parents' D-cell flashlights when the power went out? If your dad was a Postwar Prepper sort, he'd swap the batteries before Hurricane Season and stock up on more. Maybe he had one of the big plastic lights that held a 6-volt battery? 

I loved those. It was a manly thing. My dad was manly, but he was Type B about tools (unlike me). If we could find the flashlight, it almost never worked.

When Maglite hit the market, I got him a four-battery monster. He loved that light and took good care of it. He hated getting gifts, but that was one he not only accepted from me but actually talked about. It was as purposeful as a cop's nightstick. A paramedic friend said he had to use his for exactly that purpose. Nuff said.

We've had a bit of a revolution since the 1990s, featuring small flashlights with LEDs.  Forget that nostalgic Rayovac in the bathroom closet. It might throw 30 lumens, fine for finding your keys, when the cat bats them under the sofa.

The new LED lights often recharge with a USB cable, are light, waterproof, and rugged (or so the makers promise).  They can also blind someone, so be careful where you shine the things.

But how well do they work? I have owned a couple and here are a few basics:

Size: Lads, it truly no longer matters. Some of the smaller lights produce blinding light at long ranges.

Power:  These new lights provide illumination of 1000 lumens or more (a lumen is the light of a birthday candle) but no more hunting for batteries. This benefit comes with reduced run-time for rechargeable lights. Read on for more thoughts about that.

Function: Generally, these lights all feature a quick on/off button on a "tailswitch," a high/low beam and with some meant for self-defense, a strobe feature.  

Cost: Prices run $40-$200 or more. But do you get what  you pay for? Let's see.

Streamlight  & Four Sevens

Streamlight was king of the hill for a while, without any competitors.  I bought what I thought was an early model because a policeman recommended it to me. It turns out to be a (now discontinued) Four Sevens model called a Maelstrom MMR-X. It ran me about $75, new, at a sporting-goods store where I buy most of my reloading supplies.

For a few years, it was my constant companion, spotlighting paths after dark and one half a dozen occasions, showing me a Copperhead ready to bite me when I had to go out to the chicken coops or garden after dark. For that purpose, it was small enough to hold in my off hand while my shooting hand held a big old Ruger revolver for doing what big old revolvers do best. It has hi/low/strobe lighting.

The range is stunning: up to 100' on high with perfect illumination, for it and a bona-fide Streamlight I picked up last year while the Maelstrom was out of service.

Both Four Sevens and Streamlight focus on the military/police end of things; many have rounded points on the front fork, for breaking a car window when you are at the bottom of Loch Ness, then bonking Nessie on her reptilian head. That weaponized feature seems a constant with flashlights now, especially the Four Sevens line. I dislike the militia-look of the gear, but the light is a darned good companion.

Newer Streamlight products don't appear quite so fierce, but they remain the Maglites of the 2020s, minus the heft and size. Cops seem to love them, and for good reason. They are rugged (with one exception).

Therein lies the problem with the rapidly changing market for lights. My Maelstrom broke its tail-switch after trouble-free years of being dropped, left out in the rain once or twice, and used continually. It worked, but the button needed to be held down for it to function. Not good in an emergency. Here's the pesky switch that broke.

Most of these lights get activated by pushing a rubber-covered button at the back of the light. That's handy for a light mounted on a rifle, something most of us won't ever need to do. The tail-switch, to me, proved the weak link on this light. A tiny bit of plastic broke in there, rendering my light less than optimal until I found a replacement part, not an easy process.

Four Sevens no longer stocks the parts. It was tough sledding: Searches for "Maelstrom" turned up a new Four Sevens line. Luckily, an eBay seller's picture matched my light. It was listed as a Four Sevens MMR-X tail cap. 

As fate had it, the switch fit. As the part is no longer manufactured, I will order another one ASAP since it seems the only part likely to break or wear out under my rough handling. $16 costs less than a new light. I should be good another 20 years, as the rechargeable battery can be replaced easily. By age 82 I'll just hire some burly dude to carry my next light and bonk offenders with it.

My second Streamlight, still in production, is a Stylus Pro. It runs about $50 at Amazon. No milsup pretenses here: just a light the size of a dry-erase marker. Same tail switch. Nice little heavy nylon belt holster. We'll see if this light lasts. It's very solid, but the switch worries me.

Nebo 

Was a brand new to me, but already we have two of their lights: a larger hand-held light called a Slyde and a headlamp for my wife's work in the chicken coops. 

The larger light works beautifully, with more lumens than either Streamlight. The switch is on the side, and the entire light slides apart to reveal an area lamp, which shuts off the front beam. That's a nifty feature for working around my dogs in the gloaming. I don't want to blind them, but opening the light just a little throws enough ambient light to see their bowls, the holes they dig around their shelter, and the young dog that loves to get tangled up with me until I fall down.

You can see the area light here. I'm not sure if Nebo fixed what we call "accidental discharge," after a line by a flashlight-geek in a YouTube video. We say it with a laugh but it can be an issue when the light slides open accidentally. Nebo should have included a small release button. Perhaps newer models have that. 

I do like the magnetic base, so the light can double as a small shop-light on a vehicle's frame. I stuck it to the trunk lid of my Miata just now, to jump the car's weak battery with a portable jumper-pack I travel with.

This Nebo runs down its battery quickly, but a USB-C cable tops it back off overnight. Given its short run-time and weight, it's not a light I'd take backpacking. It has replaced the Four Sevens in the drawer by the back door. On the trail, however, the Four Sevens or Stylus Pro would be all I'd need.

Nebo's Slyde too has the "bonk 'em on the head" front end, though the feature is not so pronounced. More of a "dope slap" than a baseball bat's wallop, perhaps? I picked up the Nebo hand-held for about $50, on sale during a special event. It now costs considerably less.

I think our headlamp ran $65 at Amazon. It is the finest headlamp I've encountered. My wife confirms that she's not had to recharge it yet, so it bests the bigger light in that department.

These lights, like the Steamlight, seem very rugged. Again, with the switches, time will tell.

Maglite 

This US manufacturer has not broadly embraced the "Tacti-cool" look of competing newcomers, but their current lights do feature LEDs. What I love most? Maglite sells models like those I recall from 20 or 30 years ago, which means I can get parts easily. Before LEDs, I only recall replacing bulbs, never a spring or a power switch.

Maglites are US made, too. That warms my heart as someone who favors American-owned manufacturers when possible (save for cars; my rotten experiences in the 80s and 90s soured me on our Big Three for the duration). Beyond nostalgia, I have a lot of love for their lights, especially the rugged switches. You can still get their biggest mambo-jambo with the four D-Cells, which the company calls "an iconic design, not one of those ugly flashlights!"

Yeah, Maglite dissed my ugly lights. Bonk bonk on the head with my Maelstrom! When, not if, I buy a new Maglite, I'm going to opt for a rechargeable one with the USB cable. I might split the difference with their model that can be recharged or, in a prolonged outage, run three C-Cell batteries.

Whichever I get, I'll write about it here, as well as any solar chargers we get. Even with a week's worth of propane on hand for our generator, it would be wise to have a backup to recharge flashlights. Light matters.

Wait...they have a Mag-Tac rechargeable with a 2.5 hour run-time, recharger base, and "crowned bezel" top (for bonks on the head). 671 Lumens, "throw range" 185 meters! I feel more manly already.

Except I cannot find my flashlight. Bonk!

Gigantism, SpaceX, and von Braun's Nova

What? A post about going to the Moon here? This is a rural-life blog, true?

True. That said, I enjoy considering how the tools we use, from a good framing-hammer to a Moon rocket, reflect and reify deeply cherished cultural values.

Right now, many of us Americans seem to value huge things: McMansions, burgers that weigh nearly a pound, super-tall skyscrapers, hulking SUVs and lifted pickups guzzling gas on ten-lane superhighways. Add to that list the massive Starship Rocket Elon Musk wants to use to build settlements on Mars. While I'm not a Musk fanboy, I acknowledge that his engineers at SpaceX and Tesla have made some enormous contributions to technological progress. Moreover, they understand how failure teaches us to improve our work. I use lessons from SpaceX to encourage my students, many of whom have never experienced any sort of personal or academic failure; their first shuts them down, emotionally.

Yet as someone who wants us to explore space and eventually settle on other worlds, I'm concerned about the gigantism embodied in Starship.  Other objections to human exploration of the Moon and Mars, be those environmental, social, or economic, may have their day and their place, but I want to look at the problems of gigantism here.

Musk's dream, it turns out, is nearly 70 years old. In my first-year seminar, "The Space Race," we divide our time between considering the Soviet-US race to the Moon and the plans to return today. One chapter in that earlier race gets lost as we discuss NASA's plan to land humans there again: Wernher von Braun's massive Nova rocket. 

He dreamed up this design in the 1950s, refining it until NASA canceled the booster in 1964.  Budgets began to scale back America's space plans, as did some reasonable qualms about the danger of such a rocket exploding on the pad with the force of a tactical nuclear weapon.

Nova would have flown directly to the Moon, with its top stage, some 65' tall, landing on the lunar surface.  No complex dance of lunar lander and command module in deep space needed! As Michael Neufeld's magisterial biography of von Braun notes, the German engineer really intended to build a Mars rocket with Nova. That had always been his goal, as is Musk's in developing the Starship/Super Heavy Booster stack.

What an impressive sight Nova would have been, lifting off from Florida. Yet at the same time, what an improbable task, landing its final stage, the height of a six-story building, on difficult terrain. Then imagine doing that while seated at the very top of that building. Aldrin and Armstrong, during the Apollo 11 mission, found themselves improvising their landing when faced with boulders the size of automobiles. A larger lander than their small LEM (its outer skin was little more than foil) would have certainly toppled over had it landed poorly.

Today, NASA has a Moon rocket but not a lander, opting to have a version of Starship called HLS descend with crew for touchdown. Granted, we have better computers than anything Project Apollo employed. I doubt any human aboard would fine-tune the automated landing. Moreover, SpaceX has shown again and again that its smaller boosters can land for reuse, even on an automated platform at sea.

Why then was I so queasy when Starship's latest prototype blew up on its maiden voyage?  

Musk's company went through similar glitches with its Falcon 9 rockets. There is, however, a key difference that troubles me: the Super Heavy Booster for Starship sports a cluster of 33 Raptor engines to develop full thrust, as compared to the five F-1 engines in the Saturn V's first stage. The SpaceX design reminds me of the failed Soviet N-1 Moon rocket, a multi-engine behemoth that kept exploding on test flights. Finally the USSR ended the program, ceding the first landing to the United States.

Given the failure of Starship/Super Heavy's first launch (whatever SpaceX claims to the contrary) as well as considerable damage to the launch pad from all that thrust, I wonder if NASA will see any of its astronauts set foot on the Moon in this decade. If Starship continues to lag NASA's SLS, would we do what we might have done in the first place, stop subsiding Musk's Mars dream and instead land the components for an inhabited lunar base with several small vehicles, launched from Earth by smaller rockets?

Those of us who dream of settling the Solar System's other worlds have seen the price of gigantism before it got so scaled back that no sustainable infrastructure survived into the 80s. In consequence, since 1973 our species has been stuck in low Earth orbit.

Even if Musk's booster works, there's landing HLS safely. SpaceX's lander will stand 165 feet tall. Here it is, reminiscent of the single-stage rocket from  Irving Pichel's 1950 SF epic, Destination Moon. As in the film, people and cargo will be lowered from the nose on an elevator.

Thus I have some questions:

• why did NASA opt for an enormous lander so similar in concept to von Braun's, rejected 60 years ago?
  
• will SpaceX send a robotic excavator/roller to prepare a perfectly flat landing spot on the Moon?
• how soon will the company be able to test the Super Heavy with lander before the Artemis III mission?
• when would a robotic HLS practice landing on the Moon and then blasting off again?
  
• what plans do NASA and SpaceX have to get astronauts off the Moon if the Starship lander fails to relight its engines?

To be fair, for Project Apollo no rescue plans were feasible.

My questions may come to naught with successful tests of each component, until Starship is human-rated for flights. I also suppose that my final question, "what could possibly go wrong?" will answer itself. One troubling outcome of American gigantism played itself out with fire and debris last week, 24 kilometers above the Texas coast.

Perhaps, if Chinese astronauts set up housekeeping first on Luna, we'll see it a sad rebuke to America's infatuation with the gargantuan. 

This blog promotes thinking small; getting the Moon is big, building a permanent settlement bigger still, but if we choose that path as a species, how big need our tools be to get the job done safely and sustainably?

I don't use a sledge to hammer nails, or a backhoe to plant a new raised bed, after all.

The New Planned Obsolescence

Obsolescence is such a nice word. I like how it rolls off my tongue. In practice, however, I despise the idea of obsolescence.  Today we associate it with phones that can no longer be updated (I miss my iPhone 4, thank you very much). It still functions and I use it as a camera for eBay listings. But it cannot connect to Verizon's network. It cannot be updated by Apple.

Phones are not refrigerators, however. The simpler ones are the only ones I will buy, and they do not require software updates. No smart appliances, ever, for me.

Once upon a time, Maytag had the reputation for simple, indestructible appliances. Hence their repairman, "the loneliest guy in the world," an ad-campaign worthy of Don Draper of Sterling-Cooper.

Whirlpool, a company whose appliances I have found cheaply made in recent years, bought Maytag and just last month, we paid the price for this acquisition. We'd done our homework after a lightning-strike burned up a high-tech Samsung refrigerator we owned. 

Maytag had high ratings, and I found a floor-model at a locally owned appliance dealer at a nice discount. It had a warranty. Yet in fewer than five years, our simple top-freezer model began to die a slow death. First, the drains would not work in the freezer, so water began to drip into the lower compartment. Then the cooling in the lower compartment stopped working, despite a service call from a locally owned and well-regarded repair shop.  

As the repairman told me, nothing save a Subzero may last more than a decade. Nothing. Companies build their appliances that way, using cheaper parts than they once did, to keep prices stable while getting us to buy replacements more often.

It was not always that way. My GE circulating fan has been in action since before I was born, and the 1940s Frigidaire in my parent's kitchen endured 30 years, until we moved out of the house. Yes, it had to be defrosted. Yes, it did not make ice save in those hard-to-employ metal trays.

Luddite I can be, I wonder what we have gained except a costly convenience and, on a more positive note, energy efficiency. I yearn for government action to punish firms for this wasteful practice, but that seems such a 20th-Century idea in our Cyberpunk present.

So we purchased a simple GE "ice box," a term I still like to use, for under $1000. No ice-maker, either. I am using plastic trays. I did purchase a countertop Frigidaire ice-maker from Amazon that does not require a water-line. It recycles ice that does not get used, melting and re-freezing it. So far we have yet to plug it in, because the GE fridge works well enough for Spring weather. Come Summer we'll need more ice.

I doubt that our new GE will last 30 years, which would also be about my own expiration date. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I am going to try...mightily...to only buy things that have a reputation for longevity.

The dumber the tool, the longer it lasts. Dumb as a hammer. Ever broken one of them?

"Darkness is Good for Us": A Contrarian Idea About Winter

I had planned a post to review some promising new rechargable flashlights we used on farm, when a story caught my eye on Firefox's home screen. At first I thought it clickbait, until I spotted Atlas Obscura. The word "Darkness" intrigued my roving eye, and I clicked. 

My class had just finished reading LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, a fine book for younger readers about a talented young man's journey to wisdom, focusing on his Taoist realization that darkness and light need to exist in balance. It's a contrary approach than that taken in much fantasy literature, where a Manichean division exists: Sauron vs. Aragorn, for instance. Darkness in Tolkien is usually metaphorical and dangerous. It tempts us to power over others, rather than power from within.

But Tolkien rises above moral dualism; he loved the natural world. In his books we get dark skies full of stars that the Elves enjoy. That literal sense of darkness as awe-inspiring and necessary brings us to a lesson from Moffat, Scotland that we might employ in our lives. To a small degree, we have been trying it where we live.  This quotation, by "Astrophotographer and dark skies advocate Josh Dury" struck me as particularly wise:

“If you squeeze the whole of human evolution into a single day, artificial lighting has been around for a minute,” says Dury. “Exposure to light at night can have serious health implications.” He adds: “It can particularly affect our body’s hormones, including the production of melatonin, which is responsible for maintaining sleep patterns and nocturnal rhythms.” 

Read the piece for inspiration. Moffat succeeded where other communities continue to blot out the sky, at enormous cost to our natural sleep cycles and the stability of our climate. Even low-energy LEDs require power to run, so they are far from carbon-neutral.

Even if we dim our own small lights, not all of us live in places where we can turn down community lighting to see the Milky Way arch over our suddenly tiny heads. We are puny, compared to the panorama overhead.

What can each of us do to bring back some darkness? I don't always succeed every day but:

• Steering clear of all screens for an hour or more before bedtime
• Leaving house lights off in rooms that are empty
• Avoiding the American trend of spotlighting a house to show it off at night
  
• Replacing interior and exterior lighting that blots out the night with task lighting where possible, and where not?
• Installing security lighting triggered by motion. Always-on means always injected carbon dioxide into our air.
  
• Considering where all lights point. We replaced large floodlights with equally bright but lower-energy LED floods pointing downward. That way, when we need to check outside during the time when Copperhead snakes roam our yards, we can see them. Once back inside, out go the lights.

Winter remains my favorite season, partly for the lack of hot, humid weather and the orderliness of a winter landscape, but also for the power of the dark sky. It's perfect for stargazing. This year I learned a few new winter constellations that I can, luckily, see where I live. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and Perseus became nightly companions. 

In town, it was Orion. That was about it. During a trip to New York City? Nothing except the Moon. Times Square is magical at night, but I'd not be able to live in a large city again for more than a short while. I'd miss the dark too much.

I hope that in years to come, we'll rediscover how powerfully darkness helps us, as creatures who evolved to benefit from both light and dark. 

Next time, the flashlights!

image courtesy of Wikipedia.

A Woodpile Essential

I love heating with wood, and I love managing a woodlot. We cut out crooked saplings, fell a few leaners, and cut up fallen trees from thunderstorms and ice-storms. I burn it all, soft or hardwood.

That can get some woodstove owners into real trouble, if they burn too much green wood. Creosote will build up, increasing the chances of a chimney fire.

Most hardwoods take a year to be ready, if you keep them dry. Pine can be ready sooner. That said, I'd not burn a stick if I didn't check it first for moisture content.

Enter the inexpensive moisture meter I picked up from Amazon or eBay (I forget) for under $50.

To burn well, the wood should have less than 20% moisture. I trust Cornell University's advice on this. A reading on a newly cut log of 100%, this site claims, means that a log's weight is half water!

Their information contends that indefinite storage can be managed, but in my experience, wood that is too dry may as well be cardboard. It goes up fast and bright without generating too many BTUs. I discovered that with an estate-sale load of firewood, mostly white oak, that I got at $20 for a full cord. It burned but the lightness of the wood told me it had been stored for many years. I was happy to be rid of it.  The R value was less than year-old pine.

Conversely, a few years back we bought half a cord of red oak that was under-seasoned. It was the first heating season in 10 where I had to buy some wood. We did not have our meter then, so I mixed the oak with seasoned wood and waited for spring, rather anxiously, since we didn't want to run our furnace and spend money that way.

The following fall, the remaining red oak burned bright and hot, and it warmed our house well. Still, I don't want to buy from that seller of "seasoned" wood again. He haphazardly covered his piles, and that's not enough to properly season wood, without air circulation.

So I recommend something like our Tavtool. I use it in the woodpile and check several sticks on the sides and the ends. The ranges vary considerably, and the values on the scope tend too rise as one goes deeper into the log. At first, this reading was 13% but it dropped fast as the tool wiggled. Still, it's in the right range to burn.

The images show a log from a small tree that came down a year ago in an ice storm. We cut and stacked it in March, in a south-facing shelter that holds about 1/4 cord of wood (4' high by 2' deep by 8' long). Here's the end of the same log.

I have never seen readings vary more than a per-cent or two, unless one part of the log had been rained on. If you are unsure, split a piece and measure inside one of the pieces. That will give you a heartwood reading.

Finally, keep your wood dry. We build wood-boxes out of construction scraps. Shelter is key to good firewood, as is stacking for air circulation. Piles on the ground can molder even if covered with tarps and around here, harbor Copperheads in the warm months. No thank you.

 

May your woodpiles stay dry until Spring. And it's not too early to start stacking wood for 2023-24. We've burned about 2 cords, down from last year, but I need to replace them and one more to have the barn and wood-boxes full.

The Idiocy of Rural Broadband, Pt. 2

In an earlier post, I talked about the struggles with had with a local provider, finally settling on a Verizon hot-spot for our needs. 

It worked well but this post will warn other rural Internet users about a device often connected to televisions: Amazon's Fire Stick. 

 Our usage amounts to limited streaming (an hour or 90 minutes), one Yoga class online, and a 30 minute office hour meeting with students in a week. Thus we never went through more than 70 GB of our 100 before hitting the data cap and having speed slowed down. I understand from friends who watch a lot of films, TV, or play games online, that blowing through a Terabyte in a month is not unusual. 

Watching anything streaming meant attaching a laptop with a series of adapters that would make Rube Goldberg proud. An in-law with (of course) unlimited fiber Internet suggested Amazon's Fire Stick. We got the lowest-cost model, running 20 bucks with free shipping. It installed in a snap and we watched without issues a documentary about those who raise show chickens, plus an episode of All Creatures Great and Small. With Alexa and an intuitive control, I figured we had it made.

A few days later, Verizon notified us that we'd hit 90 GB of use on the 6th day of the month.

The verdict? Fire Stick. These devices will continuously auto-update (and the updates are not tiny) while the TV is off, as the device connects to one's router. Moreover, when using Fire Stick, it defaults to the highest video-quality possible, a Niagara of megabytes per hour. Finally, it plays previews and other features that devour 1s and 0s faster than a sailor on leave with pay in his pocket.

The solution is simple: unplug Firestick. We've used half a gigabyte since. We will plug it in again when we next watch something. But even then, the updates would begin to download, many of which we would never need. Thus there's some very good advice here about how to reduce data usage. We turned off all the data-gobbling settings right afterward, and unplugged the AC adapter.

We are considering Starlink, with its 1 TB cap, or awaiting the coming of fiber to our part of the county.

Many of you will not have that choice, and a cellular router of 4G or 5G may be the best choice. But watch those "smart" devices that hoover up data. These now include many appliances, security cameras, and the like.

Most of them can be dialed down if you know how. It's not in the interest of Big Telecom or firms like Amazon to tell you.

Incidental and ironic postscript: 

A Google search for the string "The Idiocy of Rural Broadband" turned up no hits for my own blog, one they host! Perhaps nothing shows because I refuse to run advertisements here.

Microsoft's Bing did turn my site up faster and as a second or third hit. I'm using Bing on my iPhone for the default search engine, for what that's worth, since it links right to Apple's map application (Safari does not take you to Apple's own map application, incidentally!). 

Google seems only to want to push advertisements to us, not feature free content. At least Microsoft, a company I've long mistrusted, got it right. 

Large companies are not our friends. They see us as revenue streams, not people. They have no one-on-one relationship as a locally-owned merchant or service may.

Act accordingly whenever you can. 

Image source: Tom Woodward at Fickr.

A Beginner's Tool Box, Part I

 

Some time back, I focused on four (+1) essential shop tools. Today I'll go out to the lumber-yard with my tool bag (or box) to focus on the hand tools for woodworking that every beginner needs. I use a lot of cordless and some corded saws and drills; more on these later. Lately, for a lot of simple jobs, I forego power tools. In fact, for a big job I went hybrid: I used a cordless drill to make pilot holes in 200 or so pieces of weather-board siding, fearing that my new nail gun would split the wood. Then I hand-nailed about 600 siding nails. Worked like a charm. The hardest part of finding the right ringshank nails!

With some luck, a beginner could score all of these tools and a decent tool bag for under $300. A good box may cost more. I won't go into brands in most cases. For saws and hammers, however, some work better than others. Buy the best you can. Check Facebook Marketplace, estate and yard sales, too. Some fantastic tools from the 50s-70s can be had for pennies on the dollar.

Do not let your box look like that! Now here goes for picks:

A Toolbox Saw: A small crosscut saw can do a lot of serious work. I've got two by Stanley called "Fat Max" that I love.

A Hand Plane: These can cost big money, but a savvy DIYer can find excellent antique planes for under $50 that need some refurbishment. I sold a pile of them for $20 each at a farm-swap this year. I've kept several others in good shape for my own use, having seen new planes that run $100-$200. I use planes occasionally for a final fit on a piece of wood, when only a little bit needs shaving off. You'll find many other uses for these versatile tools. Here's a beauty from the article "Unlocking the Mystery of Hand Planes" at Wood News Online.

A Level (or two): Spirit levels come in many lengths, but for the toolbox, get a shorty of 2' or less. Get a vintage one at a yard sale or FB marketplace. They can be had cheaply.

A Framing Hammer: I love Estwing's hammers. I think mine is a 22 oz, which my friend Jeff Warren recommended for it's power but also because a heavier hammer simply wears you out. That's my brand-plug. I've used Stanley claw hammers for years, but a framing hammer that is well made does all a claw hammer can plus has better ergonomics. The  longer handles let a framing hammer do more of the work, at least to a point. 

On a Habitat build once, since the nonprofit will not let volunteers bring nail guns, they issued claw hammers to a bunch of unskilled folk on a framing job. I joined in but I quickly got found out: I drive nails well. Me and the Estwing then got a hell of a workout, since the other volunteers were bending more nails than driving them. They got other tasks while I ended up sore for days. I must have driven 300 nails that day but we stood all the walls before sunset. I felt suddenly Amish.

A Dead-Blow Hammer: This works great for lots of tasks where you did not wish to leave a Mark. The modern plastic version is full of shot. I find it great for tapping in a board when building. The one pictured is 10 bucks at Harbor Freight. I find a cheap one like this works as well as fancy ones. It's an occasional tool. I'd aim for a weight of 3 or 4 pounds. They can scale up to sledge-hammer size!

 

A Nail Puller (or three): I use these often, sometimes in partnership with the puller on the framing hammer to remove nails. I like having a big and little one handy. 

Carpenters Clamps: I have some favorites and will recommend them: Irwin bar clamps. I have dozens of clamps, from antique C-clamps to some beautiful wooden clamps, but the Irwins are a delight: they snug down with hand pressure and release fast. I've used them for holding things during auto repair, too: the plastic jaws, if clean, will not scratch metal. Start small for the tool box, with a pair of shorter ones, but you'll end up with huge ones soon enough, hanging on the wall of the shop.

Wood Chisels: You'll need this for many small jobs to shave off a tiny bit of wood when joining things. Get a set.

A Magnet: Nails and screws and essential parts fall into the grass. Get a magnet on a handle to find them. It saves money and keeps you and others safe later. I once kept half a dozen bored college students occupied on a Habitat for Humanity build, when the crew had no more work for unskilled helpers, by asking the kids to walk the site with two buckets: one for nails, another for screws. We found a gallon or so of each. The one pictured is 8 bucks at Harbor Freight. I have some that are long bars scavenged from machinery, and put on cords to drag over the ground. Sure beats a flat tire on the pickup truck!

Roll of Masking Tape: Tape? Sometimes I need to hold a small piece of trim and don't have a helper. Sometimes I've used tape to mark a spot I'm going to cut, or to keep a piece of wood from splintering when I saw it. It's a cheap companion. And if you want to write measurements on wood without writing on the wood itself, tape to the rescue.

A Speed Square & a Try Square: I managed to finally use a Speed Square to measure angle when we made rafters for a run-in built over an old shipping container. It's the first time I've done that. I then used the square to check the angle on other rafters from a chicken-coop kit. The second tool I love is my try square. These tools often have a small level built in, but for me the magic of the try square is its ability to mark a straight line on a piece of wood that needs to be cut with a circular saw. I use a Sharpie or a pencil.

I found a page on measuring pitch with a speed square, a page with other uses for that tool, as well as a nice resource with all sorts of neat marking tools and advice on measuring here.

A Pair of Rules: I love retractable tape-measures, but I have also begun to carry a folding wooden rule. Why? When you are measuring a long distance without a partner to hold a tape, the old-school wooden rule lets you work solo. Otherwise, I always use a tape.

 So that's my list. What did I forget?  I'll do another post on tools for working with metal and, just maybe, rudiments for my favorite haunt, the auto-shop.