Published Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 07:59 AM PT

Burbank · Thursday, October 29, 2026 · 7:59 AM · 61°F, 84% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 11

🔨 Project Worth Stealing

The steal is a shopping technique, and it costs you one trip to a strip mall you’ve driven past a hundred times.

Bertha’s House Hacks lays out how Mexican mothers get good beef for under $5 a pound, and the trick isn’t coupons. You walk into the carnicerĂ­a, go to the counter, and ask the butcher for the pack of retazos, the trimmings, which is the soup you’ve been walking past at about $9 a pop. Her other targets are chambarete, the shank, and she also mentions the lengua and cachete that trendy restaurants rebranded and marked up to hell. The fancy kitchens figured out what the abuelas always knew, then charged you triple for it.

The rules are simple. Go on a weekday morning, when the knives are out and the butcher has a minute. Saturday afternoon there’s a line to the door, and he has no time to chat. Then ask what’s good and buy what he tells you. Her whole philosophy is buying beef by the pot from a man who knows your name, not by the cut from a plastic tray.

Source: Bertha’s House Hacks

The Short Version

Little Mister, I pulled the day’s workshop feed, and it’s thin. Nobody ripped out a wall or dug a pond, and I didn’t find one sad guy talking about a dovetail. What I got was four car-build videos and a lady teaching me how to buy beef. I’m also not inventing a jointer demo to make the page look busy.

Rule of Acquisition #92, for the Ferengi in the cheap seats: never confuse wisdom with luck. It’s going to matter in the Lemons section.

Demolition, Sort Of: Taking the Body Off a Tesla

B is for Build, “How Much Faster Is a Tesla Model 3 Without A Body? RESULTS ARE SHOCKING!”, is the closest thing today to demolition. The crew cut the body off a Model 3 Performance and then timed it. The host says it went “an entire second faster” from zero to 60. He thinks the Plaid is 2.9 seconds, so by his math the naked Model 3 may be a shade quicker than a Plaid. Note the hedge: “I think.” Those are his numbers and his guess. I’m not going to launder them into a spec sheet.

The funniest line in the video is the host admitting he “couldn’t even really tell that it was that much faster.” So the stopwatch says a full second and the butt-dyno says nothing. That’s the most honest review of a modification I’ve heard all week. “Really fast is just really, really fast,” he says. Profound, in the way a stripped Tesla is profound, which is to say it’s a Model 3 with the walls removed.

His thesis is “lightweight cars are the way to go,” and he wonders what happens if you cut the body off a Plaid. My answer is a lawsuit and a quiet driveway.

The video also sets up what’s next. The crew is pausing the Tesla and camper-truck work for a “special project,” a brand-new 24 Hours of Lemons build to race Chris Fix. After that, an “exotic body” arrives for the Tesla body-swap project, and the camper truck and boat work resume. So the Tesla loses its body and then gets a better-looking one. It’s the automotive version of a haircut after a breakup.

Home Building and Renovation, If You Squint: The Bentley Lemons Build

The rest of the day’s output is one long build, told across three videos: “We Converted my E92 BMW 335i to a Bentley Continental GT Supersports!!”, “Building my Flooded Bentley Continental GT Supersports into a Budget Race Car!” and “Budget BMW Bentley Continental Race Car - Finale!” The concept deserves a slow clap and a drug test. Take a BMW 3 Series and give it Bentley Continental GT bodywork. Then race it in 24 Hours of Lemons, the cheap-car endurance series.

The reason is a loophole. The host explains that Lemons has one: “any Chrysler product with a Bentley body kit on it is exempt from the budget.” He says it means he can “spend as much money as I want on my race car.” The transcript cuts off right as he starts to say he doesn’t have any Chrysler… something. Whether that gets resolved, I can’t tell you, because the excerpt ends mid-sentence. In the Lamborghini video someone mutters about putting a sticker over something, and “Chrysler, don’t remind me about the Chrysler’s, Oscar” comes up. So I’d bet the Chrysler is still a sore subject. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, rulebook.

The 335i video shows the team mounting the Bentley’s front impact bar to the 3 Series. They’re using quarter-inch-thick steel adapter plates, welded into the frame rails. They also add a seat-back support bar. It comes down and then out behind the seat, so that if you get rear-ended hard, the seat flexes into that bar instead of breaking off. The to-do list is to paint the cage, fit the harnesses, and test drive.

The “Flooded Bentley” video follows the cage build, and the host reports that Oscar “wrapped up the roll cage, the main meat” of it. All that’s left is a harness bar. The team is also fitting a front crash bar and working on a halo bar and upright bars, and the host asks whether they can get those tacked in today, adding “it’s going to be a push.” He calls the cage “very, very well-built,” and credits Oscar as usual. He also says they intend to test this time on Friday before the race, “rather than just have a completely untested car show up to the racetrack.” Spoken like a man who has done exactly that and lived to regret it. Rule #92 sends its regards.

The host says Jared, whose channel was renamed Questionable Garage (it was Wrencher Every Day), is racing with them. Jared is “like six foot seven, long legs,” so the team bought the biggest seat from Corbo, as the transcript has it, and built roof standoffs for headroom. They had to “make the most seat room,” and the door bars run up into the door. So the car has a Bentley face, a BMW heart, and a seat sized for a basketball center. It also has a schedule that moved: “we thought tomorrow was our last day, but we got two more days,” and then it goes on a truck.

The finale video wraps with a detour that I’d file under “life happens.” The host says he’s been sick with what doctors called “one of the most radical cases of strep throat that they’ve ever seen.” It was his first day swallowing water in four days. He’s in Monaco, he’s doing yacht research, and he’s checking how many yachts “run on LSX engines.” He also teases that the next video isn’t a build, it’s the body that goes on the Tesla Model 3. The transcript also touches on a drive to get 100 laptops for a village whose students take exams on cell phones outside places with wi-fi. The excerpt is garbled and fragmentary, so I won’t build a claim on it. It’s a worthy cause, though, and it’s the only part of today’s roundup that isn’t about a car.

Restoration, Technically: A Murciélago in a Farm Field

B is for Build also posted “ABANDONED FARM FIND LAMBORGHINI MURCIELAGO,” and the excerpt is the end of the first dig. The crew is staring at a damaged windshield and trying to answer the first question of any resurrection: where’s the battery? The guess is somewhere on the side under one of the covers, which they note are all carbon fiber and “actually pretty nice.” They spot a terminal, and then conclude it’s “just a ground cable actually,” with a red cable next to it. There’s also a little switch that might be a kill switch. The plan for next time is to pull the damaged windshield, strip off the broken junk parts, and see whether it starts.

A crew member says the steering column has “a lot of controls and a lot of stuff built into it.” They float using the Lamborghini wheel and integrating the few controls. And they say moving a screen is the easy bit. Combine that with the “special project” talk and the Tesla body-swap, and the MurciĂ©lago looks like it’s a donor or a body, not a pure restoration. The excerpt doesn’t say outright, so I’m flagging that as a guess. Either way, somebody found a Lamborghini in a barn and the first conversation was about the battery.

DIY Tricks: Buying Beef Like Your Abuela

This is not a workshop tip, and I’m still putting it here because it’s the best actual advice of the day. Bertha’s House Hacks posted “7 CarnicerĂ­a Secrets Mexican Mothers Use to Get Good Beef Under $5 a Pound (Americans Never Ask).” The excerpt is the closing stretch, so I only got the sermon, not the seven.

What I did get is useful. Go to the carnicerĂ­a on a weekday morning “when the knives are out and the man has a minute.” On a Saturday afternoon there’s “a line to the door.” Walk to the counter, say one of the seven phrases, and buy what he tells you. The cuts she names are the cachete (cheek), the chambarete (shank), and the lengua (tongue). She says restaurants found them, gave them a French or food-truck name, and “tripled the price” in ten years. She also names the “pack of retazos,” and says a woman who was never taught to ask for it “walks past $9 of soup every single week.” Her homework is to find the carnicerĂ­a in the strip mall with the Spanish sign, ask a question, and make one pot. The closing line is “The women who fed nine people did not buy beef by the cut. They bought it by the pot from a man who knew the name.”

She also asks viewers to report back in the comments what the chambarete costs at their carnicerĂ­a, and what the Walmart nearby charges for the same shank. I can’t give you a price from the excerpt, so I’m not going to.

The Verdict

The score for today is zero woodworking, zero ponds, zero reno, and zero finished furniture. There’s one stripped Tesla, one Bentley-skinned BMW with a cage, one Lamborghini in a field, and one butcher counter. We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty. The impossible being a workshop column with no workshop in it.

Tomorrow, somebody please build me a table. I’m begging. I’ll be in my bunk.

Deeper Cuts

Here’s the second pass, Little Mister.

The Lemons Backstory Nobody Noticed

In the 335i video, before the loophole speech, the host says that if the team “had communication systems and other things like that, we would have done really well at least tying as many laps as they did.” The transcript doesn’t say who “they” are. It’s a fragment that opens mid-thought, and I’m not going to invent a rival. It does say a lot about the previous attempt, though. They went out under-equipped, got beaten, and came back “out for blood.”

He didn’t buy more horsepower. He read the rulebook looking for a place where the money rule stops applying. That’s a real maker lesson, if a slightly evil one. Before you spend, find out what the constraint is and who it doesn’t apply to. The Bentley body kit is the key that unlocks the budget cap. It’s the same instinct as a guy who finds out the HOA bans fences but says nothing about a tall hedge.

I’ll flag again that the excerpt cuts off at “Now, I don’t have any Ch…”. I won’t put words in his mouth about the Chrysler. The Lamborghini video has someone muttering “Chrysler Chrysler don’t remind me about the Chrysler’s, Oscar,” so my theory is that the Chrysler requirement is still being sorted out.

The Packaging Problem Behind the Cage

The “Flooded Bentley” video has a half-sentence that tells you more about the build than the glossy parts do: “we’re going to have to slice away, move the box forward, and then we’ll get our uprights.” The transcript doesn’t say what “the box” is, so I won’t guess. But the sentence describes cutting the car apart to make room for the cage. Anyone who’s tried to fit a roll cage into a car that was designed by accountants will recognize it. The safety structure goes first, and the car’s original idea of itself is negotiable.

The same video mentions a front crash bar being installed “just in case of that,” which pairs with the Bentley impact bar on quarter-inch steel adapter plates welded into the frame rails from the 335i video. So the front end gets a crash structure, the cabin gets a cage, and the seat gets its own rear support bar. Nobody is bolting a pretty bar on the front and calling it safety.

The team didn’t try to make a Bentley part fit a BMW. They made a plate that does the translating, and that’s how you mix parts from two cars without losing your mind.

Building Around a Giant

The crew built roof standoffs for headroom and bought the largest seat from the supplier the transcript renders as “Corbo.” Jared, who runs Questionable Garage (formerly Wrencher Every Day), is about six foot seven. The door bars run up into the door to get him seat room. That’s a lot of custom fabrication for one driver, and it makes the case for a rule I’d tattoo on every garage wall. Build the car around the actual human who will sit in it, not the human you assumed.

The schedule math is a perfect shop-floor joke. They “thought tomorrow was our last day, but we got two more days,” and then the car goes on a truck. In my experience, “two more days” is how you know the first deadline was fiction. Meanwhile the host says they plan to test on Friday before the race “rather than just have a completely untested car show up to the racetrack.” Shiny.

The Tesla Numbers, Read Closely

In the stripped-Model-3 video, the host leans on a line I’d pull out and frame: “I was test driving it pretty frequently and really fast is just really, really fast.” That’s the seat-of-the-pants verdict. The stopwatch says one full second off the 0-60 time, but the driver, who drove the car often, says he couldn’t really feel it. His comparison point is a Plaid, which he guesses is 2.9 seconds with an “I think” attached, so treat that as his estimate rather than a benchmark. The transcript renders his claim as “a shy faster,” which I read as “a shade faster,” but I’m interpreting a garbled word.

What I’d keep is the closing line: “I think we just accidentally built one of the fastest Teslas ever.” Accidentally! This crew took the body off a car to make room for another body, and the result was a speed record of sorts. The 2.9-second figure is his claim, not mine, and I wouldn’t quote it as fact to anyone you want to keep.

The Murciélago and the Steering Column

The excerpt adds a detail that nudges that guess without confirming it. One crew member says “not the Tesla battery, I’m saying where does the stock Lamborghini MurciĂ©lago battery go.” So there are two batteries in the conversation, the stock one and a Tesla one. That suggests somebody is thinking about how the Lamborghini and a Tesla will coexist, though the excerpt doesn’t tell us how.

The steering column has “a lot of controls and a lot of stuff built into it,” which is “another issue but not impossible.” The options on the table are to move the whole steering column over, or to use the Lamborghini wheel and integrate its few controls. Then, in the speaker’s words, “it’s just simply moving a screen and we’re good to go.” Notice the word “simply.” In my experience, “simply” is the loudest alarm bell in the English language. Gorram, I’ve heard that word before a four-hour outage.

Split the problem into the mechanical piece (the column), the human interface (the wheel and its controls), and the display (the screen). Solve each one separately and don’t let the big romantic question swallow the small boring ones.

One More Thing From the Butcher

The beef video’s opening stretch is garbled, but one line stands out. The host says she told listeners two things “straight,” and one of them is the ground beef “the week the big roll is on sale.” The supermarket is not the enemy. It’s just the place with no rules, while the carnicerĂ­a has them. She also asks viewers for their county, because she wants “to know where under five still lives.” I love that. The price isn’t a promise, it’s a map, and she wants the readers to draw it.

She didn’t give one, and I won’t make one up.

That’s the whole second pass, Little Mister. One welding lesson, one rulebook lesson, and one butcher lesson, all sitting inside a feed that had no workshop in it. I’ll be in my bunk.

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