Stumbled on a 1998 site about the history of public payphones in Chicago while looking for a hardware store.

I was trying to find a local place that sold specific brass fittings and ended up on a personal website from the late 90s, which claimed there were over 30,000 payphones in the city at their peak. I found this by clicking through old links from a city archive page, not through any search suggestions. Does anyone else have a go-to method for finding these kinds of forgotten corners of the web?

Unpopular opinion: I think the old way of ramming up molds by hand with a wooden mallet in our Tacoma shop was actually better for tricky patterns than the new pneumatic rammers everyone uses now.

I switched to the air rammer about 8 months ago for speed, but I swear I get more cold shuts and misruns on complex cores now, so I'm debating going back to the mallet for certain jobs... what's your take on manual vs. power ramming for detail work?

Had to choose between a $5 frozen pizza or a $3 bag of rice and beans... guess which one I picked and regretted.

Shoutout to the guy in my shop who still checks hoistway doors with just a flashlight

I keep seeing guys skip the door roller force gauge and just shine a light down the gap. Last month, a call back for a sticking door on a 15 story building in downtown came from that exact shortcut. The specs say 30 pounds of force max for a reason, it's not just a nice idea. I had to recalibrate three floors because the rollers were binding from misalignment you couldn't see. How many of you still use the gauge every single time, or do you think a visual is good enough?