man that hit me right in the gut reading this. i did the exact same thing with a guy on a gardening forum who kept telling everyone to save seeds from heirloom tomatoes because certain varieties were gonna disappear. i thought he was just being obsessive and weird. then last year i tried to find this specific tomato my grandma used to grow and it was gone, completely gone from every seed catalog. i actually found his old posts after he'd passed and he had detailed notes on where to buy backups and everything. it's crazy how these random forum people end up being the ones who actually cared about preserving stuff that mattered. losing that part of the internet really does feel like losing people all over again sometimes.

Gonna have to disagree with you there... I've been running an old TS-2 I got for almost nothing for like eight years now and it's still dead nuts accurate. The new ones have nicer knobs and maybe smoother dials, but the core holding mechanism hasn't changed that much. I think people get caught up in the shiny new paint job and forget these things are basically tanks that barely wear out. My buddy bought a new one last year and honestly, I couldn't tell a difference when I used it. Save your money and just re-grease the threads on the old one, it'll outlast you...

Read somewhere the power stretcher's only safe if you crank the plate angle right, but yeah it beats redoing wrinkles...

Wait, didn't your shop-made one cost like two bucks?

Did you try stomping on a rock first to loosen the ground?