Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
In honor of the new DIY Humble collection launching today, we checked in with Make: author, columnist, and one-time editorial director Gareth Branwyn, whose most recent book, Tips and Tales from the Workshop, is the featured title in this bundle.
Gareth is an accomplished author and journalist who has significantly shaped geek culture and led maker culture.
His books include Borg Like Me, The Happy Mutant Handbook, and The Best of Make:. As a journalist, he has covered technology, media, DIY, and cyber-culture for Wired, Esquire, The Baltimore Sun, Details, and other publications. He’s a former editor at Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing, as well as here at Make:. Today, his ‘Tips of the Week’ column is one of our most popular features.Learn more from and about Gareth in our newest Make: books podcast. We’re so proud to be able to cast a shining light on this marvelous writer. Here are the top-of-mind questions that arose after spending some good absorbing time with Tips and Tales from the Workshop. Get it and some $300 worth of our best do-it-yourself writing in this new Humble deal for just $20!
Make: In Tips and Tales, you recommend pre-making mistakes? Would you please explain this!
Gareth Branwyn: Ha! That’s a good one, shared with me by the amazing maker, Andy Birkey. Andy works a lot with religious artifacts and church restorations, sacred and irreplaceable objects, where he can’t make mistakes. So, before he starts doing anything on a restoration job, he thinks through everything that could possibly go wrong and tries to work around any such potential mistakes. I think this is a good idea for any type of making, and especially as a safety practice, e.g. anticipating the actions and potential failures of a tool and what you need to do to avoid them.
This is as much a philosophical text as a how-to book. I assume it’s intentional; what was your thinking?
I wanted to do a maker book, a tips and tools book, with some heart and some real depth to it. I wanted it to be an amazing collection of shop tips, but I also wanted it to tell stories, offer context, and to be as eye-opening and readable as possible. Balancing all of that was a fun challenge. The writer Sean Ragan called my book “a course on how to think.” I love that people are taking that away from the book.
This book is written “bird by bird” in parts. How did you approach compiling and writing it?
Most of it was grown, week by week,…
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