Introduction

[Jon]

Very interesting to see this brought up. I was recently commenting on the excellent HomeShopMachinist.net, in this thread. Their famous 241-page Shop Made Tools thread is the largest homemade tools thread on the net. It's becoming unwieldy, and they're discussing how to handle it, both historically, and with an ongoing solution.

Agreed that the lone homemade tools forum category is rather broad. Our saving grace is that each tool gets indexed in our encyclopedia, including title, description, author, image, categories, and tags. It's difficult to reconcile a fine-grained ontology with an all-in-one forum scheme, so we essentially paired one manually-controlled tight categorization paradigm (the encyclopedia) with another much looser "post anything" one (the forum).

We do have our lesser-known experimental "Ingredients" organization, here: Homemade Tools Ingredients . Not sure if we'll keep it. I do like the concept on recipe sites, where you enter the ingredients you have, and they tell you what you can make. I'm not sure it translates to: I have wood, I have PVC, I have screws, what can I build?

I would agree that some entries are more accurately categorized as tool "tips". However, those bite-sized tips are often incredibly useful. So we're essentially relying on a broader use of the word "tool". What I would like to do (not sure who suggested this, but it wasn't me) is a specialty thread or newsletter listing all of the small tips.

Agreed w/mklotz on the synergy effect. One of the things they're discussing at HomeShopMachinist is that the short posts in their mega tool thread (like "great job", "nice tool") are cluttering the thread. In a giant thread, I agree. But in a separate one-tool-per-thread setup, the synergy expressed in such posts contributes to the overall camaraderie, and results in more contributions.

Also agreed that additional technical construction details accompanying each tool would be excellent. We've identified this issue, and we're addressing it. Our Plans Marketplace is almost ready to go, and should be launching this week.