My SO and I have been planning to start a mushroom garden for awhile now. You can buy these kits with mushroom spawn in peg form, and you just drill holes in a log and hammer them in. I'd had big dreams of going along the bike path, adding them to all the dead logs there, until I learned how important it is to properly and thoroughly inoculate freshly-cut logs in order to make sure your fungus of choice is properly established and safe from the competition. This was a bit of a problem as we live in an apartment and the circumstances where I'd cut down a healthy tree are seriously slim, and don't include providing food for mushrooms.

But one of the perks of having a big family is that one of them is always doing yard work, and when one of their birch trees bought it in a recent snowstorm, I was ready to jump in and claim a few pieces. They were happy to get rid of it; they feel grey birch burns poorly - and I was happy to take some because it supposedly turns beautifully on the lathe and it's a suitable medium for shiitake mushrooms.

As an aside, I prepped one thinner piece for use on the lathe. I clamped it to the table and used a draw knife (and a regular carving knife) to strip off the bark, before painting the ends with wax. This helps prevent cracking and checking due to uneven drying from the ends, and spalting/mold/rot from moisture under the bark. Assuming it does as well as the maple and oak I've done previously, it'll be ready to use in a year or two.

Okay, back on to the mushrooms! We bought our kit from a company called Northspore who provided pretty thorough guidance. Their instructions said that logs 4-6" thick and 3-4' long would be good, and one of ours fit that nicely. The instructions also said our log had been cut at about the worst time, after the buds on the branches had begun to swell. So... sorry, mushrooms! Hopefully you'll figure out how to make that work.

They provided a drill bit, instructions on how deep to drill (1") and where (in staggered rows, each hole 4" apart, 2" from their neighboring rows, so it makes diamond patterns). I grabbed a drill and measuring tape and set about drilling all the holes.

(I also cut a couple risers out of a dead log to keep the mushroom log off the ground)

Once all the holes were drilled, we started hammering in the pegs with a rubber mallet.

I don't have great photos of this step (it was a lot of fun) but here's one of the log after we got them all driven in.

The last step was to seal all the pegs in place with melted wax. The kit provided powdered wax and a little fuzzball on a wire handle for applying it. We set up a double boiler on a hotplate and melted the wax while we added the pegs.

We hid our mushroom log in a shady forested spot near the apartment fence. If all goes well, I'll be back with mushroom pictures sometime next year.

#mushrooms #gardening #woodworking

This was a pretty quick little project - some of my friends recently bought a house, it came with a shed, and the door of that shed was broken. The design of the door allowed it to swing open about 180 degrees, at which point it'd hit its own frame.The wind must have caught it one day and swung it open hard. When that big wide door hit the frame so close to its fulcrum, it just snapped right down the line. It also bent all the hinges.

The previous owners tried to fix it, it looks like by lifting the door back in place and driving some mismatched screws through some wood scraps and metal plates. That left the door drooping, hanging crooked in the frame, and flexing kind of alarmingly when it opened.

We'd talked about taking it down and fixing it properly, I even took some measurements.

Then one morning I got lucky, I saw a post on our local Buy Nothing -type page where someone was offering up some 1"x12" boards they'd been using as shelves in a shed. They were a bit weathered but otherwise in good shape (no cracks, warp, or rot). It was trash day in that neighborhood so I hustled out there and claimed the whole pile. 1"x12"s ain't cheap.

On the way back I picked up a shovel with a cracked handle which I fixed with a hose clamp and have been using for a couple years now.

We set a day, I packed the lumber and tools, and we started in on the shed. I think we also planted a peach tree (using my new shovel) that day.

We started by taking the door off the shed and setting it on some sawhorses I brought.

(Dog helping hold down the door)

This was where we made our first unfortunate discovery. The shed was older than we'd realized. The 1"x12"s the door had been made from were rough cut, not dimensional, so the boards I'd brought were about half an inch narrower, and a quarter inch thinner than the originals.

So we had a couple options here - all the boards were rotten for a few inches of the bottom. We could replace all of them with the new ones, which would be a close fit of all our materials, and would lose us a couple inches of width unless we added another board, or we could save lumber all around and change the design to keep most of the existing door but make it a little janky. They were good with that, so we did a kind of strange design.

First we removed the split board and it's support scraps and set them aside. Then we cut one of the new boards to the original/final height of the door.

Next we measured far enough up to catch all the rot, and we cut the door that much shorter.

We attached the new vertical board so it extended a couple inches at the top and bottom (it's on the right in the picture above). Then we added two braces across the face of the door, so they went across at the final height of the door/the long new board, leaving a bit of space above and below the old boards. These would add some extra ridigidity, by having pieces going across on the front and the back, and they'd hide the difference in length. Then we cut some pieces to go behind them, fitting flush above and below the old boards. These weren't structural, they just took up space so critters and weather wouldn't get in.

Once the door was made, we started looking at hanging it again.

Unfortunate discovery two: the doorway was crooked. Part of that was the fault of the badly rotted board which crossed the doorway under the door. It didn't seem to be doing anything but catching rain and soaking it up, so we pried it off and replaced it. Luckily it only crossed the doorway, it wasn't actually part of the building frame, which seemed to be in okay shape. The top of the doorway was also out of square, but not enough to be a major problem. As they reminded me a few times, it's a shed, not a house.

We straightened out the hinges by putting them on a brick and pounding on the high points with a small sledge (not ideal but it worked). Then we hung them back up and attached the door. From what I remember, it sat just above the new lower plate when it was closed, might have rested on it but I don't remember.

The last step was to cut a thin piece to attach to the inside of the door frame to make up for the width lost by replacing a roughcut board with dimensional.

From there, I think we called it good. It had rained on and off during the project, and we didn't want to re-attach the trim while it was wet for fear of trapping water between the boards.

We cleaned up the tools and had some pizza.

As a side project, I took the original, very rotted wooden door handle, and the scraps of the split board. From the dimensions of the original and the look of the wood, I figured they cut the original from scraps of the same roughcut 1x12s they built the rest of the shed out of, so I wanted to make the replacement the same way.

I traced the original onto the wood, flipped it end for end, and traced it again, and sort of averaged the two. The original wasn't actually symmetrical but my replacement would be much closer. Then I started sanding it down until it was comfortable to hold. I pre-drilled the holes for the screws, including space for the heads, so they wouldn't split the handle when it was attached.

I stained it, I think my usual mix of Gunstock and Red Oak, then applied a few coats of urethane, sanding lightly between coats. I even got the back, where it'd touch the door, and the holes for the screws. I figured they could paint it whatever color they painted the door, like the original, or leave it as-is, either way it'd be very waterproof and last a long long time.

All it needs now is a new coat of paint.

#fixing #DIY #woodworking

This was an earlier project on my make-everything-from-junk adventure. I've actually built two arcade cabinets - the first with the goal of using only secondhand stuff, sort of sequestering various junk into something that would be around for awhile, and eventually gave it away on our local Buy Nothing -type group. It was unfortunately very poorly documented, I don't have many pictures of it.

This second one was a gift/reason to hang around in the workshop building something with a friend. They'd seen the first one, and we got talking about building an arcade cabinet custom for them. I like projects that cross a few domains, woodworking, painting, electrical, etc, and I really like reusing materials. Ad I love having a reason to hang around working on projects with friends, so I was excited.

I really like the archival efforts around old arcade cabs, but I generally think of new custom-built arcade cabinets as being kinda wasteful. They use lots of new material, particle board, etc, and take up lots of space, often for a luxury item that doesn't end up getting used very much.

But playing retro games was actually already a big part of this friend's mental health routine so I knew they'd use it - and I was confident I could find most if not all the material secondhand, which would save them a lot of money. (In the end, we did use one panel of storebought particleboard for the front plate/door just to get it finished. Otherwise, aside from the buttons and raspberry pi, we still managed to make it all from old stuff.)

I started with what we already had: various 2"x4" and 1"x2" boards, some particleboard and plywood cut to the dimensions of the previous cabinet which could work as shelves, and most of the particleboard from a big upright storage cabinet which would be perfect for the sides.

A year or two earlier, I'd spotted it disassembled on trash day on my way to work. I hate to pass up good material so I quickly hauled it home before getting back into my routine. When a different friend really wanted to carve pumpkins during the COVID times, I took the sides of the cabinet, screwed on four table legs I got from metal recycling and set it up as a long table on our porch.

We used that table for quite awhile, as a simple workbench, and a side table at friendsgiving.

The pieces I'd used as a tabletop were just about perfect, a good height and depth, if you stood them on end. Unfortunately some fool had driven a bunch of screws into them, but that's what bondo is for.

Maybe it seems counterintuitive to start with materials rather than a design, but that's a big part of how I've always made things. I take an inventory of what I have, figure out how it can go together, figure out what kind of designs we can make with that, and work out a list of what else we'll need. I should note we also already had a TV - it belonged to my friend and it was important to them that we use it since it had no input lag (apparently the TV I got secondhand for the previous cabinet did, and that was a problem). So we knew the measurements there and it was compatible with what we had. Maybe it's just where I am, but I've found TVs of an appropriate size for an arcade cab screen to be absurdly easy to get, either from Buy Nothing or my local swap shop.

We now knew the upper limit on the height of the cabinet (as set by the cabinet/table pieces) and the width we'd probably use (based on the shelf pieces). Those were our constraints, so we started talking requirements. My friend is very tall, tall enough that on my more traditionally-shaped arcade cab, the marquee/roof blocks their view and they had to hunch forward to see the screen. The control panel was too low, making the posture problems worse. This would have to be taller in order for it to be comfortable. They wanted to be able to use it at parties, so the screen couldn't be recessed too far into the cabinet (either we'd have to cut the sides away like a traditional arcade cabinet (difficult to get that just right, likely we'd mess up the plastic cladding on the particleboard) or it'd have to be close to the front. They also wanted it to be sturdy. Really sturdy. I really enjoy overengineering things, so I was looking forward to that part.

My first suggestion was that we do something based on this Gravitar 'cabaret' cabinet prototype.

I had a few reasons for this: the marquee was below the screen, so the screen and controls could be as high as possible. The screen was closer to the front, so it would be easy for spectators or groups of players to see it from an angle, and the overall adjustments to our side panels would be aggressively simple. Two straight line cuts at a matching angle, that I could do.

We talked design ideas a bit, as now was the time. We could do a specific game, or something generic (although I've always found the mame and other generic all-videogames themes to be really uninteresting, personally). Perhaps because we were basing our design on an abandoned prototype, they decided to aim for "like we found some weird pirate arcade machine out of time" and they picked the theme 'goblin dive bar' based on our shared love of warhammer.

I started drawing up a cabinet design, we talked about a logo and I made this from an old warhammer orks and goblins design:

Many thanks to them for pushing me to make it simpler and simpler. I think that was a good call.

Arcade cabs are a great project because they take at least a little of everything - I really enjoyed the graphic design bit and went on to make stickers to cover it with later. With that figured out, I added a couple other flourishes, the moons on the marquee plate and the yellow buttons. My friend picked the name of the arcade company and we tried some stencil fonts and a layout for the side art.

This is the mockup I gave them. It's pretty hacked together but I wanted to make sure we were working from the same plan.

Once that was done, it was time to start building. My original plan called for a frame of 2x4s forming a cube inside the structure, with 45 braces at every corner, with the sides attached like cladding. In the end that was mostly what we did, but we used some smaller boards for the frame and relied on the sides a little more for the structure.

I tried to find my original sketches, but wasn't able to. Either they were on wood I've since used in another project, or they're on some envelope or receipt mixed in with the rest of my detritus. Instead I drew this up from memory and the pictures I have:

This sketch shows all the framing without the sides, front, or control panel. All of this was scrap lumber. The uprights were mostly a 6"x4" pressure treated post we ripped lengthwise on my neighbor's tablesaw (wear a dust mask if you're going to do that), the supports for the TV were scraps of house siding, and the big board supporting the TV was I think a scrap of 2"x12" which had been used as a concrete form and was pretty much garbage as far as materials go even after I scraped off most of the concrete.

We wanted it sturdy, so it had to have an internal frame so it wasn't relying on the particleboard sides for structure. I wanted the control panel in particular to bear its weight through the frame right to the floor. We also screwed everything to the inside of the sides of course, and that on its own was surprisingly sturdy. Lots of 45 degree braces helped to ensure it wouldn't sway or twist at all.

The TV frame was an improvement over my last design. On that one, the flatscreen sort of just rested in place on some rails. This time I wanted it to be fastened in place - after all, we were going to have to move this to my friend's place, and then they'd be moving it from apartment to apartment (and they since have, with no problems!).

I don't have a ton of pictures from early on (I never think to take any until it starts to look like something). Here's one from while we were trying to make that 2"x"12" look better with bondo. Even once it was sanded smooth it still looked bad enough painted that I eventually cut a piece of plywood as cladding to cover it.

We made the control panel from a piece of 1"x14" composite pine I got from a disassembled ikea bookshelf I found on trash day. When I was working on the last arcade cab, I asked around on our Buy Nothing page and met a professional woodworker who had a large table router (this is before I got my little one). He helped me rout a round edge onto my control panel (plus a spare in case I messed up drilling the holes for the buttons) and to cut a slot I used for the marquee.

My friend and I used my spare to make their control panel. They picked the layout using some more lessons learned to improve on my first one, opted for the same sega layout I picked (found here) and we drilled the holes. They opted for a nicer set of authentic mechanical buttons and joysticks than the cheap kit I'd used the first time around, and I think that was a great call. Those buttons are also useful in other electronics projects.

We also filled in the front cut edge of the particleboard sides with bondo and sanded it smooth.

Once we had the basic structure and made sure the TV could fit, it was time to paint it (while the weather was good).

For this I printed out a large stencil at the local makerspace and cut it out by hand.

This was a large but simple four-layer stencil (black circle, yellow, red, white) so cutting it out took no time at all. Unfortunately, the only paper available for the plotter printer was super flimsy, and that would be a pain later on.

For the first paint session we only did the round logo. We weren't sure we'd be able to do both sides, so we started with the one which would face the room (this side also got the best particleboard). We had a bad combination of elements here - flimsy paper and because I couldn't find my good artist's yellow spray paint, we were stuck with some generic watery hardware-store-brand spray paint with the approximate thickness of kool-aid. We had to paint the black circle, paint the stencil of the moon with white, then use the yellow over that. By then the stencil had warped and in some places stuck, so the black layer was messed up with underspray and missing paint. Luckily we still had the 'negative' from the stencil, so I used that to protect the yellow while I fixed the black. Then we did the white and red.

All of that was a mess and I wouldn't recommend it as a strategy. It was one of the worst ways I've had a stencil project go, but the end result wasn't bad.

And in a second lucky break, because it was sprayed onto particleboard, it actually cleaned up pretty well with isopropyl alcohol.

The finishing touch for that side, the company name, was comparatively easy. dimensionally it just fit inside the laser cutter, so we used that to cut it out of cardstock.

I think we even painted this one on indoors (another bad idea but the cab was heavy).

We definitely weren't going to repeat all that for the side facing a corner, so we did a simple two-color racing stripe instead.

It's always nice when your stencil is just a length of painter's tape and some newspaper. Even that garbage yellow paint couldn't go too badly this time around.

We made another trip to the makerspace and cut out a couple more things. The first was the very basic phases of the moon template I'd bashed together for the front marquee, the second was a fake coin door and buttons I found online.

We thought about doing something fancy like getting a real coin door, wiring up buttons so you had to push them for the 'coin' button in the emulator, but it seemed like a wiring hassle and our plan was for the lower part of the cabinet to be storage, so it'd be better if there wasn't wiring hanging around in there.

Painting the stencil on wasn't hard because we didn't have to haul the whole cabinet outside, we just painted a thin strip of particleboard with veneer black and stenciled it, then attached it to the front above where the door would go.

Now it was time for wiring. We got the TV in place and fabbed and test fit its bezel. (The bezel was too big for the laser cutter so we had to cut it by hand with a box cutter and a straight edge.)

I marked the mounting holes for the screws in the back of the TV by putting in some screws, daubing black paint on the heads, and settling the TV in place against the back board. That got close enough, though it was always a pain screwing the screws in through crooked holes in a pine board. I don't think we usually had all four attached, but it didn't seem to make much difference, the weight was on the board underneath, the screws were just to keep it from falling out when it was moved.

Then we added the buttons. Suddenly it was starting to look like something. I had to keep shooing my friend off the control panel (which wasn't currently doing anything) because they were so excited about trying out the joysticks and buttons. The verdict was good though, it was a comfortable height for them, even with shoes on. No carpel tunnel risk on this one.

Oh yeah, cable management is my passion. I think my friend eventually redid it so they looked nice.

I wired the cab up for power using some outlets and a lightswitch I got from our Buy Nothing Group, some spare wire, and a power I cord I ripped off a refrigerator someone was throwing out. (Don't worry, they'd already taken the doors off and dumped it in a pile face down on the curb). Learning from last time, I set it up so two sockets were switched and two were on all the time (so the TV could be left on). It's a fairly simple circuit, but just in case I took a ton of pictures and ran it past an electrician I know, who said it looked fine, asked if it worked, asked if it caught fire, and gave me their blessing.

I printed the case for my friend's raspberry pi. I know we could have used a regular old junk PC and still even been able to run retropie if we wanted, but they were planning to leave it running most of the time, and the pi has comparatively low power requirements, so that seemed like a good long-term plan.

It lives!

You might have noticed that somewhere in here the design had changed. My friend was worried the 'shelf' area for your hands on the original design would be too crowded, and the screen was a bit close. Considering that it was a widescreen TV which would only be showing a square game in the center, the cabinet sides didn't actually hide much. And standing the TV here simplified construction even further.

I cut a separate marquee piece for the bottom of the TV (I think because the design changed somewhere along the line?). It had a cutout at one end so the TV could see the IR light on the remote, and so the user could reach the buttons under the screen.

I glued the two pieces together, painted them, and worked out a way to attach it using hangers at the top. I remember it being difficult to attach it in a removable fashion, without anything showing on the front, and this is what I came up with.

The final design used wooden pegs to fasten it together for some reason, and I remember you could push them back out using a pencil which was handy during all the test fitting. There was probably a better way but this has held up fine.

The next step was finding enough flat, single panel material for the front panel/cabinet door. I watched our Buy Nothing and Everything is Free groups, and scouted around on trash days for months, looking for something big and flat enough (tabletops etc) and had no luck. A few house doors came up but they were like an inch too thick for how we wanted to do the hinges. Finally I gave up and bought a slab of particleboard. The home depot I got it from was able to use their fancy saw to cut straighter edges than I could have with my skillsaw, which was great. When he was done, the guy asked if I wanted the rest. I said they could keep it to resell, I was happy to pay for the whole thing to get the piece I needed, and he said they'd just throw it away. That's how I ended up with a (I think) four-foot by eight-foot piece of particleboard cut into two door panels and one long piece. The spare door eventually became the top of this table. The long piece hasn't found a use yet but it'll probably end up being a shelf. I haven't gone back to those stores since.

The last piece was a bit of cladding glued/screwed to the board under the TV. I honestly cannot remember why I did it this way, but I painted it black, glued it in place, and we only decided after to add labels to the buttons on that piece.

I took a bunch of measurements of the buttons, lasercut a couple very simple START SELECT stencils with various spacings, found one that fit well, stuck it in place (probably with easy-tac), masked the area with tape and newspaper, and gave it a couple quick hits with rusto white.

Considering the circumstances, I'm pleased with how they came out.

The last big task was moving the thing. That was a challenge as making it sturdy made it pretty heavy, though not as heavy as the real thing with the big CRTs would have been. We rented a moving truck, and used ratchet straps to fasten it to the back inside wall, standing upright, wrapped in blankets. As a bonus, we also delivered some speakers my neighbor wanted to give away.

My friend was planning to replace an armchair in their apartment with this cab. Their plan was just to throw it away, but first thing when we got to their apartment, I posted the chair to our local Buy Nothing page with the promise we'd deliver it. Then we set about hauling the cabinet inside, rearranging furniture, getting everything hooked up, cleaning off months of sawdust, and finally testing it out.

Hanging out, finally playing games on the arcade cab, in the place where it was supposed to be, was awesome. It's since seen a lot of use at parties, and it gets a lot of attention from newcomers to their apartment. We still haven't gotten around to stickerbombing it yet.

By the time we were done and the celebratory snacks had been eaten, we had a taker on the chair. We drove it to their apartment and carried it upstairs on the way back to the rental place.

A few months ago I discovered the Shōwa era Gamera movies and I gotta say: I love this goofball. I love that he's a giant turtle who stomps around on two legs. I love that he eats fire and screams constantly, no matter what he's doing. I love that he dances when he defeats an enemy. I love that he is, canonically, a friend to all children. And I love that he flies through the sky by retracting his legs into his shell, shooting fire out the openings, and spinning through the air like a frisbee.

Every year I try to make a new Christmas ornament. We normally add a few as souvenirs from that year (keychain from a place that was significant that year etc), but I always like to add a little carving if there's time. This year's pick was Gamera (flying).

I started by looking for suitable models (in real life or printable) and quickly decided it'd be easier to just make it from scratch. I've made cravings of animals before so a turtle shell was doable, especially if I cheated and used power tools.

I sketched the shape using different movie stills and posters as references. His design, both in the art and even the costume, sometimes varies, so I picked whichever features I liked best or were easiest. Unfortunately, for as long as this ended up taking me, I took surprisingly few pictures along the way. So I guess I'll paraphrase my dad's favorite unhelpful carving advice: picture a turtle shell inside your block of wood, then remove everything that isn't part of the turtle shell.

I started by sketching the shape top-down onto a piece of scrap pine and cutting it out on the band saw. Then I used the belt sander to rough it down to a turtle shell-ish shape. It's important to oversize it, because if you're like me, you'll need room to correct mistakes. And you do that by removing everything else around the mistake until it's gone. Here's an early rough version of it

I kept sanding it down, consulting occasionally with images from the films to make sure the overall shape was correct (or at least not mutually exclusive with the material I had left).

Eventually I got it smoothed down and could start positioning legs, tail, and head holes in the shell. Unfortunately, this is apparently where I stopped taking pictures. I can tell you that I needed to make this much thinner, and took a lot of material away from his belly, and flattened the shape of the shell. I cut in a pattern of the underside armor, and then removed a bit between it and the upper shell to make it more distinct. I cut the holes into the sides, but left a sort of volcano shape inside for the four limbs, so it would look like the jets from one of the movie posters. I did a similar thing for his head and tail, but didn't add a hole in the middle for fire to come out of. I also carved his head kind of pointed, with the ridges which run from snout to eye (though the eyes are hidden) and removed some material around his tusks.

On his back, I drew a scale pattern, and the worked from the tail end to the head with a dremil, cutting away the 'top' end of each scale, just below the next one, so it would look like they're overlapping. On a big animal carving, I probably would have done this more carefully, but this is kinda just a silly ornament for the two of us, so I wasn't stressing getting the scales perfect.

Once that was all done, I drilled holes into the 'volcanoes' sticking up from the leg holes. I hadn't decided how I'd do the fire yet at this point, but I was thinking sprigs of painted wire.

The next step was painting. All the costumes and even in the art have Gamera looking pretty one-note, color-wise. Just sort of a blue-green-grey color. I started with flat black spray paint, getting it pretty thoroughly, but in many light coats (so as not to raise the grain from the wood), then hit it with with lighter coats of brite blue from an angle, to try to preserve some of the darker color in the nooks and crannies. Then I mixed some green and blue acrylic paint and did a sort of drybrush all over. I painted black into some of the nooks around the jets, and head and tail. I painted his tusks white.

Then I got some breadbag ties, the wire and paper kind. I was going to do a small bouquet of them sticking out of each jet, but the first test actually looked quite good on its own. I cut four of them (tapering it a little so it'd go into the hole better, and so it'd look more like flame on the other end) gave them each one twist, and painted them yellow-orange-red with a bit of flame pattern. They fit in tight without any glue.

Finally I drove a little eye-loop into the top of the shell and tied an old clothing tag string through it.

#diy #zerowaste #carving #woodworking

Here’s another quick one. I don’t enjoy oil painting as much as I do photobashes and other digital art, but it’s still a lot of fun in the right moment. I needed a picture frame for a recent one, to complete a gift to a relative. It was on a stretched canvas, rather than canvasboard, so the frame had to be deeper than normal. So decided to just make it from scrap lumber I had squirreled away.

I started with this stuff. These 1 ½” by 1 ¾” boards were part of a kind of disappointing haul I got from my local Everything is Free page. I don’t remember what it was I thought I’d find there, but by the time I got to it, all that was left was this tangle of busted-up boards from inside some kind of homemade builtin cabinet. They were cracked from their demolition, and full of wood screws, but I took them because there was still plenty of good material and I think I wanted to justify the trip.

I pulled all the screws and used them in another project, and when I went looking for material for the picture frame, they were pretty much perfect. Plenty of material, and I didn’t have to worry I’d use it for something better. The painting was of a rustic cabin, so the frame was going to be a bit rustic anyways, so a little battle damage was no big deal. I measured and marked them based on a picture frame my grandfather had made (I would have used it instead but it wasn’t deep enough for the stretched canvas). I cut them to length, then down to 45 degrees on my miter saw (it makes squaring up lumber and doing corners absurdly easy, I used to do them all by hand and getting them to fit was much more art than science back then.

Once I was looking at it, I realized the frame was a bit too thick, and decided to remove about half an in depth from the four pieces. This would be quick work on a table saw, but I don’t have one, so I marked a line and used the band saw. Then I sanded up all the sides on a belt sander until they looked good. There was a bit of stain left in deep spots from the original project, and I tried to keep some of it – I like a little character and history from the life of the piece. This wood was a part of someone’s home, they knocked it out with a sledge hammer, a weird goblin man came by on trash day and took it, now it’s a picture frame hanging on a wall.

Then I had to use the router to notch the back of all the pieces to hold the actual canvas. My router was a recent junk store find, it’s the old craftsman kind that’s a hand router bolted to the underside of a little fiberglass table. I screwed it to the workbench over the lathe, down on the far end, since its out of the way and that’s my heaviest workbench. I have plans to rewire the router, so you can turn it on and off with a proper tool switch, like I did for the drill press, but I haven’t done that yet, so turning it on meant reaching underneath, feeling for one of the handles, finding the trigger and the locking button, and setting them, at which point it begins to spin. It’s awkward and I wouldn’t want to have to do that in an emergency.

This was my first time really using a router on my own projects, so it wasn’t quite as pretty as I’d like, but overall it looks fine. I definitely want to replace the small, two-part fence with a taller one that runs end-to-end and gets closer to the blade. That would reduce the piece’s ability to wobble when its only braced against one of them.

Once the notch was cut I found the 45 clamp didn’t work that well so I stuck each joint together with a big dab of wood glue and a couple small dabs of super glue. The super glue gives you just enough time to get the pieces where you want them, and sort of acts as the clamping force for the wood glue, which takes much longer to dry.

Once it was dry, I stained the frame with Sedonia Red, it came out a sort of pink color but I think it’ll be a good fit for the white cabin with red trim in the painting, and the recipient can always hit it with a second coat of a darker stain if they choose.

The last step was to add a cable to the back. They make little metal picture frame hanger things, and I thought about just cutting and bending one from a soda can, but to be honest, I kinda hate those hangers. I don’t think they work well and they feel unreliable to me. Usually I just use a strand pulled from some damaged CAT 5 wire, but this time I happened to have this metal cable left over from… somewhere? I honestly can’t remember what it came from. But it’s the sort of thing I keep because it doesn’t take up much space and it’ll be useful eventually, and sure enough it was! The loops had already been cut, so I just drilled a hole through the little aluminum clamps at either end, used the vice to squeeze them down on the wire a little extra, and used them to attach the cable to the painting.

I measured both holes from the top, and predrilled them with a thin bit to make driving in the nail easier (since I didn’t want to break the picture frame.

As a very last touch, I cut a tiny sliver of wood and glued it into a notch where the miter saw ripped out a bit of wood at the top left corner. A little stain blended that back in nicely.

Overall, not bad for my first picture frame. It’s a little rough, but it’s supposed to look that way.

#woodworking #diy

One of my hobbies is fixing up old furniture to give away. This one was interesting because I was able to combine two pieces of damaged furniture to produce something decent.

(This is a somewhat challenging one to write up because despite having the thing taking up most of my basement for months, I somehow failed to take any in-progress pictures of the desk itself. This is probably because almost all of the work was done on the desktop instead, but it's still kind of annoying.)

So almost a year ago, someone on my local Buy Nothing page offered up a mid-century desk. The kind with two file cabinets, pull-out writing surfaces, a central drawer, and a panel in the back. It even had the feet. The only problem was that it was missing the top.

It seemed like a fun restoration job, so I stated my interest and they let me know where to pick it up.

Once I got all the parts home and took some measurements, I put up a few posts on the page over the next few weeks asking if anyone had an old tabletop with the right dimensions. And someone did. She had the absolutely perfect top for this project. It was an old ikea table of the exact right dimensions, which had been stored in an open-sided garage for years. The finish had weathered off, the wood had bleached silver, birds had dumped on it, and the metal legs had rusted to the point where even I didn’t think they were recoverable. In short, zero guilt for taking the top and redoing it to match the desk (I always hate ruining one thing to make something else, but this wasn’t very fixable as a table).

(I also failed to get any photos of the top before I started sanding, but here's one of it near the end that might give you an idea as to how it looked)

I spent the next few weeks sanding it down until I just had bare wood, and had removed most of the water damage.

Then I stained it, in two coats, of two different shades of brown, trying to hit the sort of medium shade the rest of the desk was made in. All my stains and urethane are also secondhand. The top came out slightly redder that I'd have liked. I’d say the desk has a more yellow-brown tinge, but all in all, I was quite pleased with it.

Looks more orange in this light than it is. I applied several coats of polyurethane (using a brush because I’m a furniture refinishing monster). This was somewhat tricky because I was working outside - the local bugs decided to explore it and I had to keep chasing them away/rescuing them.

Once it was dry, I removed the rest of the table hardware (boards that ran width-wise across the underside, and which held the screw-in metal plates for the table legs to attach to). I saved the hardware because it’s always useful eventually, even if I don’t think I can fix the rusted-out galvanized table legs. The threads appear to be standardized, so other table legs (and even the short feet made for the desk) seem to work with them.

Assembly was as simple as putting the desk together, marking my drill bit for depth with some tape, and predrilling holes for some short screws, to attach the metal brackets on the desk cabinets to the underside of the top.

Finding a home for it was a little more difficult but the Buy Nothing page came through. I offered it to a person who was acquiring furniture for their neighbor, who was planning to host refugees in a spare mother-in-law type apartment. They ended up not needing it, leaving her with a pile of disassembled desk stuck in her garage. She was a good sport about that though, and a month and a couple posts later, we found another taker, who was happy to get it all set up. So now a incredibly sturdy, absurdly heavy old desk, and a weathered tabletop are back in use and hopefully will be for many years to come.

Once you get access to a laser cutter, you start to see all kinds of places you can use it in a project. Our local makerspace has one, and the more I use it, the more I find new applications, whether that’s in fabrication of flat parts, or just adding flair to smaller panels of a large project.

Around Christmas, I decided I was going to fix up my dad’s miter saw. It was an older, discontinued Delta 36250. The guard was missing (my grandfather didn’t believe in tools having guards) and the plastic insert in the table, where the saw blade came down, had been shattered for years.

The guard was an easy fix, I bought a replacement part from ereplacementparts. But the plastic inserts were out of stock. In fact, even the scam parts websites that all look identical weren’t bold enough to lie and claim to have any of these things. Having examined what was left of the original, here’s my theory for why:

They’re junk. The space they fill is 5mm deep, but they were made to be cast out of plastic about 2mm thick with a lip around the edge to fill in the space. That plastic was super brittle. And then, just to make things better, the slot in the plastic, where the saw blade would go when it cut through the wood, wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the blade when it was rotated to do cuts at a 45 degree angle. Which it was designed to do. So the blade would come down through the wood, hit the brittle plastic at the wrong speed and blade type for cutting plastic, and shatter it. The inventories were out of stock because everyone broke theirs and ordered new ones, and they weren’t worth making in the first place.

The obvious answer was to cut something close enough out of plywood and call it a day, but I wanted to get fancy with it. So I took some pictures, removed all the screws, claimed all the shards of plastic, measured the space, and brought the pieces home.

Luckily enough pieces of the insert remained to get every measurement except overall length (which I measured while I was there). I used my calipers to get the original slot width, positions of the screw holes, etc. I drew up a vector image with my best guess at the final dimensions, and widened the slot until it slightly exceeded the damage marks from when the saw cut into it at a 45.

To get the curve at the corners I scanned in one of the shards, pasted it into the schematic in inkscape, and adjusted the rounded corners setting on the rectangle until it matched the scan.

On our makerspace night I cut a few cardstock templates, chased the screw holes around the design until they lined up with my plastic shards. And because I like adding some decorative aspect to practical items, I also drew up and cut a stencil of the name of his old military unit surrounded by a hawser rope.

This is one of the places the laser cutter really shines. When I was doing spray paint stencils in the past, I always cut them by hand with a scalpel blade (ironically cheaper than xacto knife blades). But this is tedious, takes forever, and certain designs really don’t lend themselves to it, so you find yourself spending lots of time gluing your bridges back together as they tear or bend. With the laser cutter, I had a template literally in minutes, and at least as precise as I could have done it. Some folks feel the art looses something when you make it easy that way, I’m personally more about results, especially when I’m on a timeline.

At some point in there I tested the paper insert inside the saw. Here it is, installed backwards for some reason. Good work, past self.

The makerspace didn’t have any plexi in the thickness I needed for the insert, so I reached out to TAP plastics for a recommendation. They had a bunch of options in 4.5mm plexiglass which they’d ship in custom dimensions, so I could get something small enough to fit inside the cutter. I went ahead and ordered the High Impact Modified stuff since it's a present and it's going to be getting lumber thumped down on it and dragged across it. About a week later I had it. Enough material for four tries.

We ran the first cut slow in order to cut the thicker-than-usual plexi. That ended up melting it a bit along the edges and at the holes, so we did the second in two passes. Before we ran it, I also redesigned the vector with smaller holes, and sent it again. This one came out better dimensionally, but the cutting fogged the plexiglass (it was the kind that came protected by plastic sheeting rather than paper, so we had to remove the stuff before running it in the laser). This wouldn’t be a problem except that I was planning to stencil some spraypaint art onto the back of the plexiglass, so it would look deep and glossy, and would be protected by the plastic itself. I covered the remaining material in painter’s tape and ran it again.

The third one came out great, and I took them home for finishing.

The next step was to chamfer the screw holes on the drill press. This would let the heads of the screws sink down into the plastic where they’d be out of the way of boards sliding across the work table.

Once I had that done, I peeled the painter’s tape off the back,and for once managed to remember to double check that it was actually the back and oriented correctly and everything. Then I attached the stencil so it was mirrored. I normally use temporary spray adhesive where I can to fasten the stencil down, to minimize the underspray. But a reverse stencil means any glue residue would end up between the plastic and the next coat of paint, so I had to skip it and just use stencil spiders (little metal weights, usually nuts, with paperclip/wire legs, which help you pin down high points).

I got very lucky, the paint went on well and didn’t leave me with any spots I had a problem with. I gave it a couple days to dry before messing with the stencil (this was good graff artist paint, but I’ve had the cheap stuff dry tacky, then when you try to lift the stencil, the paint stretches, snaps, falls onto the work and bonds there. I didn’t think that would happen with this stuff but I wanted to be really sure). Waiting to find out if it came out okay is the worst part, for me.

When that was dry I checked it over, and painted on the background color.

By that point, I was out of time to check it for fit, so I wrapped it and waited until Christmas to find out if it would fit. Later that day, we tested it, and it was overall pretty good - I had to chamfer the holes a bit deeper on his drill press, and used a thin round file to adjust a couple of them just a touch outwards from the center. But it fit and looked quite nice overall. (The picture above is the fogged one, which I gave him as a spare)

My vector file isn’t perfect, but I’m providing it on my website just in case anyone out there has a compatible saw and also access to a laser cutter, and for some reason wants to follow me down this road.

The saw file is available here as a pdf: https://jacobcoffinwrites . files . wordpress . com/2024/01/saw-insert-great . pdf (apparently wordpress won't host SVG files.)

And here as both pdf and svg: https://mega . nz/folder/CdMwVDQa#yiHp5k_WbOxrNcYCRwWyiA

(Sorry not to show the stencil work, I realized partway through writing this that my dad wouldn’t appreciate it if I did, but I still like talking about the stencil art process and I'll definitely have more stencil projects to share in the future.)

One of my hobbies is fixing up ewaste laptops and giving them away. I actually do lots of ewaste electronics, from TVs to space heaters, but the laptops are where I put in the most work. Some are new, intact, and ready to go with nothing more than a OS reset. Others have had parts removed or damaged, and need more work. Most of these computers I give to a local refugee resettlement organization, but some of them are old enough, or otherwise weird enough that I wouldn’t feel right about giving it to someone who already has a lot of problems to deal with. I try to make sure they get fast computers with familiar operating systems whenever possible. So far, I’ve always had enough decent machines to pass along that that hasn’t been an issue.

Through this project I made friends with a guy who works at the local recycling center. He does a similar thing with TVs, though covering even more organizations and moving more equipment than I do. He helped me up my game a lot. He provided some old Windows multi-use keys, a ton of cables and USB hubs to give away with each laptop, an almost endless stream of power bricks for any model I needed, and recently he was able to get the management there to agree that he could take laptops too, if he caught the people who dropped them off and asked if they were okay with it. Otherwise the site policy says they need to be securely destroyed.

So suddenly I had two sources of hardware, which was a huge help in providing computers to everyone who needs one. Not all of them are great though – sometimes you get a laptop with a single DDR1 ram slot (can’t go above 1GB), or in this case, a couple chromebooks with expired, insecure OSs. He wasn’t sure I’d be able to do anything with them, and asked me a few times if I was sure I wanted them, but I didn’t feel it was a big risk. I’d try fixing them up and if there was an issue, I could always put them back in recycling. Neither one seemed like a great fit for the refugees, they only had 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of on-board storage space. No hard drives. But the hardware was nice: lightweight, with a nice screen and keyboard, and the batteries were awesome. I hate to throw something like that away.

I started with reading about my options and settled on MrChromeBox’s script for replacing the ChromeOS and firmware with a proper BIOS. The website and instructions were thorough and worked perfectly for me.

Step 1 was removing the hardware write protection. I think all chrombooks have some kind of write protection that prevents you from paving over their firmware. In some it’s a jumper wire connecting two contacts. On other models its a lack of a jumper. Sometimes they use a screw to bridge those contacts, and on some, the battery itself acts as the bridge and you can only reinstall the BIOS when the battery has been disconnected and the laptop is plugged in.

Mine was an easy one, enabled with a screw. The website didn’t have a photo for this model, but it wasn’t hard to find since it looked different than all the rest. (I’ve since sent this photo to MrChromeBox in case he’d like to add it.)

Once that was out of the way, I followed their instructions to get to the correct command line interface and entered the commands to run their script. Very satisfying. A great ratio of ‘feeling like a hacker’ to actual effort involved.

Once the script completed, I had basically a regular laptop.Probably closer to an old netbook in terms of hardware. I could install Linux Mint but it would take up most of the storage space. I received a bunch of microSD cards as a gift, so I bought a super low profile microSD to SD adapter and stuffed a 512GB microSD into the SDslot. That’s going to be a pain to get out some day.

The BIOS is happy to boot to the SD slot, so I installed Linux Mint there. Suddenly I had a regular laptop with plenty of storage space, a bit light on RAM, but it’s a perfect little computer for carrying around the city and going to write-ins, etc. Light weight, good keyboard and touchpad, awesome battery.

I know I could have used a lighter-weight OS, but Mint is sort of my default. Its super convenient, has wonderful all-around compatibility, good community support, and just works well when I want a computer that isn’t itself, a project. Between the web browsers, the preinstalled Libre Office, and the writing tool Wavemaker Cards, I have everything I need for most of my projects.

A few days into using it we had a makerspace night, and since I had access to the laser cutter, I put together a quick solarpunk stencil. I love using the laser cutter to cut stencils. It turns hours of work into minutes, and it can do intricate designs with narrow bridges that I’d often have to glue back together after tearing or accidentally cutting. Plus, it works best when cutting thick cardstock paper or thin cardboard, which makes for better stencils, but is a pain to cut by hand. To reduce waste, I used an old cracker box for my stencil.

Once it was cut out I saved the bits and pieces in case I wanted to do this design as a reverse stencil sometime.

To make sure the size was good I laid out the bits and pieces on the center of the laptop. Eventually I corrected the tilt so it followed a line from the top right to the bottom left corners. Once I had it in the right place, I lightly taped the gear part in place so I could use it to position the actual stencil later on.

With this one there wasn’t any reason not to use some temporary spray adhesive, so I spritzed the cardstock with that, let it dry enough not to leave residue, stuck it down, and peeled up the gear. I usually use old return address stickers, the kind charities send you forever after you donate once, to cover up any gaps on the stencil, and to keep the other masking stuff in place. The stickers are great whenever you need tape but don’t care how it looks.

I used the same yellow graff paint I had from years ago and recently used on another project. I tried to hit it straight down, mostly to avoid anything slipping in under the edge of the stencil and because I hadn’t masked the rest too well. With such a simple stencil it wasn’t really a big deal.

Once it was done I had my traditional moment of panic as I realized I hadn’t really checked that I’d applied the whole thing right-side-up, but it worked out this time, saving me a lot of hassle. As paranoid as I am about other measure-twice-cut-once preparation tasks, you’d think I’d be better at this one.

And that’s about it. The laptop’s working well, I’m actually writing this post up on it at the moment. Overall it’s a good little writing laptop, and I’ll probably set its sibling up the same way soon enough.

This is a quick one, but nice demonstration of the perks of keeping stuff until its useful. I found this extension cord/usb charger while digging through ewaste.

Someone had clearly wanted it unplugged, probably while it was behind something heavy. And unplugged it is. They bent two prongs and ripped the grounding prong out altogether.

About a year ago, I took some old extension cords from an estate cleanout. Awhile later, while helping a friend build an arcade cabinet, I dug one out and cut the socket off it to wire the cabinet up for electricity. Unfortunately, the sheathing around the individual wires inside the cord had crumbled away to almost nothing, and it wasn't safe to use. I gave the copper to a friend who sells metal to a junkyard, and kept the plugs from either end.

Rewiring these isn't difficult, just stripped the wires and attached them to the correct terminals.

My neighbor gave me this old neon tester, super useful when you want to check your work. Later I plugged a bricked, ewaste 1st gen ipad into the usb socket and it started charging. Seems to be all set.

So there's my excuse for why I keep all these odds and ends.