Three washes and that whole stack of tees I did for the church fundraiser started cracking... I used to swear by their prices but I'll drive the extra 20 minutes to my old guy now.

My first freehand section was so crooked it looked like I was highlighting in a windstorm. The speed tradeoff is real though, I'll take a little wonkiness to get out of foils faster and still have them look good in the bowl.

That air intake thing is a good catch for sure, but I gotta disagree a little bit. Plenty of people run smaller intakes and still push through stalls fast, they just manage their fire differently. The real trick is learning to read your smoke color and fire bed depth way before you ever touch the intake size. If you're dumping fuel in and choking it down with a tiny intake, yeah that's gonna suck. But a smaller intake can actually give you better control over your thin blue smoke if you know how to run it. I swear half the battle is just being patient and not panicking when the stall shows up. Different strokes I guess, but bigger isn't always better when it comes to air flow.

Same thing happened to me with my '68 F100. I used to tighten them by feel and always ended up chasing vacuum leaks after a carb rebuild. Once I grabbed a torque wrench and stuck to the factory spec, everything just worked better. Those old cast iron intakes and aluminum carbs really don't like being over-tightened.

and it's literally everywhere now, not just in tech. i saw it with my buddy who runs a little coffee shop, he was stressing about some fancy ordering app nobody asked for instead of just making sure the espresso machine worked. it's like everyone got addicted to the new new thing and forgot that the old thing is what actually pays the bills. same with how people remodel kitchens every 5 years now instead of just fixing the leaky faucet. feels like we're all just chasing dopamine hits from shiny stuff instead of doing the boring work that actually matters.