My neighbor Steve once spent an hour crying over garlic skins and swore off soup forever.

Buddy of mine bought a used one and it caught fire first use.

Buddy of mine runs a small job shop and swears by swapping his end mills every 10 hours on stainless, even if they still look good. He showed me this one time we were working on a batch of custom brackets, pulled a tool that had maybe 8 hours on it and it had a tiny chip you couldn't see without a loupe. Ran his finger along it and said that one would have snapped on the next pass for sure. I figure it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when the material costs are what they are these days.

dart point ended up on the outside" - yeah that's exactly what I did for way too long. Makes total sense when you think about folding fabric to keep things flat on the outside, but it messes up the whole internal structure. I bet a lot of people do it that way at first because it just looks cleaner when you're working on the outside. Once I switched to putting the dart point inside the garment, my linings stopped puckering at the armholes and shoulders. It's one of those small changes that makes a huge difference in how the finished piece actually hangs on the body.

Whoa hold on there @mary614, I gotta push back a little on this one. I get the appeal of plasma gouging, but I've seen too many guys blow right through the base metal because they got too aggressive with the settings. That 2 inch thick plate might be forgiving, but on thinner stuff or tricky joints, you're gambling with a do-over that takes way longer than just grinding it out. Plus the gouging arc leaves a real hard heat affected zone that can make your new weld crack if you don't prep it right. I'll take the grinder any day for root passes, keeps the metal honest and my rework count low.