Oh man, tell me about it. I rented a corner rounder once that just shredded the edges. Was that thing even sharp? Totally pushed me to just buy my own basic tools.

Your buddy's extra plasticizer trick is a fast way to ruin the whole batch.

Totally feel that. Ruined a whole batch of aluminum housings last year from the same thing. Honestly thought it was a bad tool path at first. Took forever to figure out it was the coolant concentration. Ngl, it’s such a simple fix but it causes the worst headaches. Makes you paranoid about checking everything twice now.

My old boss at a marketing agency spent over two grand on a site crawler that just pulled basic Lighthouse data. The real issue is these tools hide the free feature in a fancy report to look valuable. Why do we keep trusting the demo over checking what our browsers already do?

Tbh @rowan_thomas is totally right about the color match being everything. I learned that the hard way on some oak trim. Used a standard wood filler, stained it, and it looked like a beige band-aid stuck on there. Completely different finish. Now I keep scraps of everything. I'll mix the stain right into the filler paste before it dries, or even layer a tiny bit of the clear coat over the dried filler first to seal it. That final step is what makes it actually vanish instead of just being a filled hole.