Sarah's Heater Shield Project

Sarah has been studying Great Britain in social studies.  As a class project, she had to make a shield with a coat of arms on it.  She chose to make a heater shield with our family crest on it.

STEP 1:  Sarah made a ton of drawings for her shield design.

STEP 2:  She made a poster board template of the shield and taped it to the 1/4 plywood and traced out the shape.

STEP 3:  She cut out the shape on the bandsaw very carefully.

STEP 4:  She hand sanded the edges.

STEP 5:  She smoothed out the shape using a drum sander on the drill press.

STEP 6:  She made a temple for the snowflakes that represent her as the third daughter of the family.

STEP 7:  She drew out and painted the coat of arms on the board.

Here is Sarah proudly displaying her final product.

Dice Popper Prototype

Here's my first prototype for a dice popper:

Eventually I am planning a 7 module version with a full set of polygonal dice for Pathfinder.

Bandsaw Reindeer: Rough Cut

My first attempt at a bandsaw reindeer.  This is an old 2x4 I cut down, so the quality isn't great, but it let me work on my form.

Dollar Store Birdhouse Condo

Here's a cool project.  My daughters and I painted up some dollar store birdhouses in bright colors.  Then we mounted them to some 1/4" plywood squares (painted black) with small holes in each corner.  By choosing the right hole size, we could use twine tied with knots to hold each birdhouse in place.  We tied a rock on the bottom to keep it from tumbling in the wind.

Tying them all together was a bit of a chore, but Sarah helped me with that.

And here's the finished product:

Band Saw Project Number 1

Yeah, I've been away from this blog for a while, but I recently got a bandsaw and now projects are underway again.

This was the project I saw on a Lowes Creative Ideas email:

And this was my version:

Tillandsia Pot

Tillandsia is an air plant that takes no soil.  It needs a place to sit but no soil.  They have to be watered like normal plants, but pull all the nutrients they needs from the water.

We keep forgetting to water them.

To get them watered I made a regular pot with a plant in the top with a drain hole that runs down by holes for the tillandsia plants.  When we water the plant on top, the tillandsia plants get watered too.

Hen and chick on top with tillandsia plants in holes in the side.

Hen and chick has rock mulch around it.

Tillandsia plants are hot glued into place in holes on the side.

New Woodworking Jig for Making Chessboards

I am wanting to make some chessboards.  The boards will have slots cut with a table saw between the squares.  To do this, I needed to make a jig that can set the distance between the edge or another slot to exactly 1 1/2 inches.

The new jig fits right on my table saw.  Feet underneath fit in the miter gauge slots and a stop on the front rests up against the front edge of the table.

A thin strip of wood is inlaid into the top 1/2 inches from the blade and sticking up about 1/4 inch.

Recessed bolts hold the jig in place.

A miter gauge slot was routed in.

The slot fits tight with the miter gauge.

Thanks to my helper...

... we were able to get some nice parallel cuts with our new jig in a test piece of wood.

First Wood Carving

I started with an excellent tutorial here.

I have a lot to learn and it will be fun learning along the way.

Desktop Terrarium Project

This was a really inexpensive project for dressing up my desk through the dreary winter.

Collected materials:

• Colored stones from dollar store
• Air tight glass jar for $5 on clearance at local hobby store
• Potting soil
• Plants (These were perennial hen and chicks that I had to dig out from under a snow bank)

1. Washed out the jar with water.
2. Washed the plants with a little water since they were bare root. Left them damp.
3. Placed stones around the outside of the jar in a colored pattern.
4. Added a layer of potting mix.
5. Placed more stones around the outside of the jar.
6. Added more potting mix.
7. Wet the potting mix until water was visible around the stones.
8. Added plants, patted them into place.
9. Placed the jar in a sunny spot.

Surprisingly these pictures taken a couple of weeks after planting show that the hen and chicks established nicely even though they were frozen under a snow bank. I also planned to add some irish moss, but I couldn't find it. Maybe I'll add it in spring.

Pepper Sauce

So, with many peppers around, we decided to try a new recipe. The recipe for pepper sauce, found here, only takes a few minutes. Put a handful of peppers, some peppercorns, garlic, and a pinch of salt in a jar, and cover in warm apple cider vinegar. Allow to cool, stopper, and keep in the fridge. In a few days the vinegar absorbs all the flavors and is ready for use.

We'll let you know how it turns out.

Spider project

I pulled the gutter worms ( a leaf blocking system similar to large pipe cleaners) that I used to have in my gutters when we had our new gutter covers installed. The left overs made nice spider legs. I attached them to a cloth-covered octagon. The body mounts on a small detachable post. The LEDs from an old solar spot light got rewired into the ping-pong ball eyes so they solar charge during the day and glow at night.

I am hoping to augment the scariness of the project by building a remote controlled spider on top of a radio controlled car. Chasing trick-or-treaters with a spider on Halloween should be great fun. :-)

Little Workers

The girls are in the shop today repairing their wagon.  I guess it is contagious.

Treasure Chest

I grabbed an armload of cutoff lumber at Menard's for $4, combined it with some old hardware salvaged from a dresser, and built a treasure chest.

It still needs some sanding and maybe a coat of stain, but not bad for a first attempt.

Now I just need some treasure to put in it.

EeeServer

So my old Celeron clunker pretty well died, leaving me without a server for music and internal web stuff. During an OpenSuSE 10.3 update, something bad happened, and ls started returning seg faults. Bad, bad, bad. And this was after rebooting it every few days for months due to hardware glitches. The machine was never stable. I think the motherboard had developed an intermittent short.

Luckily all my data was intact on external drives and in a couple of config files. I justed needed a new home for it.

So, I decided to sacrifice the little EeePC 900A I had picked up. For my personal netbook, I was strongly considering switching to another machine anyway, so it was a cheap option (< $200).

First of all, the default EeePC Linux OS sucks. It is clunky and slow. I figured I could live with that on a server, but there was no way I could install all my server software on it. So I searched around and settled on EeeBuntu as my server OS.

Making a bootable USB stick for a live test and eventual install was a snap. I chose the base install, since I only have a 4GB SSD on the system, and I didn't need all the user apps.

I was very impressed with performance and ease of installation. It was everything I expected from Ubuntu. I turned off X, added my planet install, samba config, and my external drives and it runs beautifully. Best server ever: low power; fast; easy to maintain; built-in keyboard, LCD, and touchpad; built-in UPS; cheap.

Bird House

I have some old lumber leftover from some palettes for materials I had delivered last summer. The wood is tough stuff and has a few mail heads stuck in it here and there from where I cut the palettes apart with a sawzall. I finally decided to use the lumber to make bird houses and feeders to put in the flower gardens and to give away. My wife agreed to paint the bird houses and feeders.The first attempt only took about twenty minutes to build. I cut the 4 sides out (two rectangles, two rectangles with triangles on top) using my compound miter saw. I lucked out in that the left over piece was the right side for the bottom. I then cut two rectangles out of another board for the roof. All cuts were square (no angles). I used a hole saw on my drill press to cut out the entry hole and a bit to make a hole for the dowel perch.

Assembly was done using an air nailer. I glued the perch in with wood glue.


I chose rustic looking wood for the whole project. The nail heads and mishapen edges seemed to add to the character. Some of the wood was slightly different sizes, but the small gaps (less than 1/4 inch) only seemed to add to the rustic feel of the project.


My wife painted flowers and a "Home Sweet Home" sign on the birdhouse.


More to come later as I try new designs.

Recycled Wood Rack

We had an old dining room table with a glass top that broke. I decided to reuse the frame to make a wood rack for my garage.

The frame had the legs removed. I drilled four holes through the ceiling in my garage, making sure to go through one of the 2x4s lined up with the outline of the frame. I drilled matching holes on the frame. I put threaded rods down, putting a large washer and 2 nuts above and a washer, nut, and codder key below to hold the frame.




Obviously with an aluminum frame, the key thing for use will be not to overload it. Still, it should be able to hold a fair amount of lumber up and out of the way.

G1 Cupcake and Stereo Bluetooth Headphones

I picked up a set of bluetooth headphones (Motorola S805 Bluetooth 2.0 DJ Style Stereo Headphones) off of Amazon and waited patiently for Cupcake to Arrive on the TMobile G1 Android phone. After much waiting, I finally got the update and voila: Cupcake (technically Android 1.5) was installed.

I had already added a 16 GB microSD card and loaded all of my music collection. With the new headphones I was ready to try out the music and headphone functions. Boy, was I amazed.

The sound is good (DJ style headphones almost always sound good after listening to earbuds). The range is decent (across a room). And, most surprisingly, the volume and controls on the headphones work as advertised. The next track, previous track work fine. The headphones also allow me magically answer and hang up on phone calls all without ever touching my G1.

This is a sweet setup and just had to share my good first impressions. I'll post more in the weeks ahead as I get more time on the setup. Now this is true wireless bliss.

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Update:

Well, I have had the setup working for a while now and I am ready to add some new info.

Ok, first up, it appears that my Cupcake G1 will skip music once in a while. It seems to happen primarily when I have wifi enabled. Under normal operation (not on wifi) it seems to work great.

The sound quality, which I have to assume is influenced by the MP3 quality, headphone quality, and playback under the G1, is not as good as I would like sometimes. I think I miss having the typical equalizer settings on my PC which probably compensated for some of the limits of the MP3 quality and headphone quality. The MP3s sometimes sound a bit flat. The beat/bass sounds a bit off sometimes too, which is a little disappointing with such large headphones, though I am betting the source is probably the MP3 quality.

The headphone battery life seems good. I have noticed that low batteries reduce the range of the bluetooth. The other day I had a problem with bluetooth cutting out with the headphones on my head and the phone in my pocket. I charged the headphones for a bit and they worked flawlessly again.

Overall, my experience is still very positive. I love the wireless setup. It is true music freedom.

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Update (Jan. 2010)

I've had my headphones for several months. I had just a few more notes:

• Pandora is really awesome with these headphones on the G1. I definitely recommend using 3G if possible. The G1 seems pretty maxed out while playing Pandora, but less so on 3G.
• Headphone controls don't work completely properly with Pandora. Volume works.
• An extended life battery for the G1 really makes the music player more useful. If you don't have one, a USB charger near where you use it most can be helpful.
• I wish there were a way in Android to send only media to the headphones. Sometimes I don't want to use the headphones to answer the phone. Maybe Android 2.x will add this -- no idea.
• Overall, I am still very pleased with the G1 with Motorola headphones.

Horizontal Tomato Cages

For years, I have been wanting to install horizontal tomato cages, but I never got around to it until now. The basic idea behind horizontal tomato cages is that you place the wire mesh horizontally so you don't have to reach through it to get tomatoes. It also features mesh that can be easily moved for tilling and dead plant removal at the end of the season.

The design is fairly straight-forward. You need a minimum of four posts. Each of the posts should be placed in the ground deep enough to secure them. You can set them in concrete if you so desire. The width should be matched to your tomato plants at full size or to whatever is convenient. I chose a couple inches wider than my rototiller, so I could fit it between the posts. The posts have small pieces of wood screwed on as ledges at each mesh height.

The mesh is put onto frames. I used pressure-treated 2x2s for my frames. Vinyl-coated mesh also is a nice feature.

The frames set on the ledges on the posts and can be secured in place by 4 screws (1 into each ledge on each post). To remove the mesh and till between the posts, you only need to remove these 4 screws in each mesh frame.

Here are some views of the finished product:

Fig. 1 A view of the mesh frame sitting on the post ledge.

Fig 2. A side view of the cage.

Fig. 3. The finished product.

$4 Charging Station

To make an effective charging station@for only $4, I used an outlet strip ($3) and a basket ($1).  The outlet strip was plugged in behind and chargers into it.  The strip was held in place with double-sided tape.  Cords were threaded through the weave of the basket and labeled with a labelmaker.  Phones can sit in the basket or be clipped to the side.  I also plan to add a homemade bean bag pillow to weight down the basket and to cushion the phones.