The Stuff I made

I Made Little People for a Friend

2011-06-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

A while back I went to Austin, TX to visit my good friend Barbara Tomlinson and hang out, climb rocks, and lounge around for a week. While she was at work she asked me to make her something with a small mountain of unused electrical components and general goodies she had around her place, and these are what I came up with over a day or two. The gears turn on the panel piece and I made her the archers since she's been cross that I sold the archer a while back and it wasn't to her. Sisyphis and the horse just seemed to pop up and that mouse ball was asking for someone to roll it.

I Made a New Post on S2S (and a bunch of stuff)

2011-06-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

Hey all, I've been pretty busy in the last couple months with house and work and bank stuff, but I've also been making stuff too. Among them are a motorcycle parts mouse, motorized 1920's style bicycle, a charcoal forge, a twisted railroad spike knife, tongs, another mini motorcycle, and the start of another full-sized human figure. Czech it out here on Scrap to Sculpture.

I've also made a picnic table out of recycled wood that's strudy enough to hold up a few hundred pounds of steel and act as an anvil stand:

And a nice deluxe rabbit condo largely from pallet wood:
......
But I have no photos of it at the moment. Dang.

I Made a Shark (his name's Nibbles)

2011-01-08T07:16:00.000-08:00

With the house being at a pretty stable place and having a space between the holidays and school/more house work starting back up I figured it'd be a good opportunity to make something new. I went and saw my friend Barbara after Christmas and among a bunch of other stuff she gave me there was a few chunks of a rusty old sawmill bandsaw blade which was screaming to be made into some teeth. We'd watched some of "Inside Nature's Giants" too, including an episode with a Great White, so when I grabbed a couple bits of blade that bowed into a D shape easily I knew a shark would be really nice to do with those blades.

I cleared out a spot in the carport to lay out some scraps and see what might fit where. A couple of old ladie's bike frames seemed to have a good shape for a tail, a leftover hunk of motorcycle highway bar would make a fine dorsal fin, a conduit spine, and a couple chunky bits of motorcycle and scooter frame would make a good base for the chest and head.

Cut, bend, bang, clamp, and weld and the basic structure came outpretty easily. Also after I cut the bike frames to make the tail I realized how nice and similar the leftover frame chunks were to the shape and size I needed for pectoral fins. I only managed to hit my foot with a hammer twice in shaping them the rest of the way to where I needed them too.

Before going much farther I wanted to get the whole thing up in the air at the level you'd be looking at it from so I didn't wind up attaching something in a way that'd look fine on the ground and awkward at eye-level, so I went about making a square peg fit in a round hole. The scooter frame chunk was in about the center of the body and had a nice reinforced chunk of tubing that used to support the handlebars and floorboard on a scooter in a previous life, and I figured it'd work well as a sturdy pivot in it's current life. I also found out that this hole was just about the same size as a small hitch receiver which I no longer had any use for since I traded my trusty CR-V for a Tacoma a while back. I've never seen a square peg go in a round hole so well.

Now with the whole thing lifted in the air I put all the big fins in place and welded the top jaw up too. It was starting to look like a shark, but only from the side. Long-ways it only looked like a shark if you squinted and turned your head sideways, so I needed something to fatten up his cartilaginous bones. Rust-locked rims from a kid's bike looked just about right, but I didn't have enough to fill in everywhere I wanted to. I tried a local bike shop near my house to see if they had any similar wheels, but they only had aluminum ones. Then I tried the trusty rusty cycle shop near my dad's house since I needed to get a few things straight on my bike too and sure enough they had my bike right and a mess of small rims waiting for me before the evening was out.

The next morning dad brought over a bunch of lumber and plywood for the new roof, so I had to retreat to the back yard to work on the shark. The rims worked out great to fill in the body and give him some shape, but I was still worried about how I'd make the nose and head work out. My scrap pile is already on the skimpy side since the move, but it always seems to have something tasty and just right for what I need if I kick it just right. Turns out football helmet face guard + motorcycle chain guard = shark nose.

After that it was pretty close to done, so I added the last bit of highway bar as a back fin, another row of teeth, and a few other little bits to complete it. Since the archer looked so much better and felt so much more done once I wire-wheeled and clear coated him, I did the same for Nibbles. I made sure to go thick on the teeth, and that bandsaw blade feels nice and slick now. Can't wait to do some more stuff and see when I can go hopefully clog up the art walk again.

I've Been Making a House (with lots of help)

2011-01-08T06:51:00.000-08:00

That's right folks, I'm not dead, but I haven't posted in a long while. The biggest reason for that aside from the holidays was that in October I moved into a house and started renovating it. I'll have to get some before and after photos up, but it started out looking like a pack of wild dogs lived here with holes in the wall, nasty smells and trash all over the place, and a patchwork of half-assed and jury-rigged repairs spanning back at least a decade.

Started out by gutting the place out: carpet, old heaters, nasty linoleum and congolium tile, trash, filthy counters and cabinets, etc... and about $200 worth of scrap metal behind the house which paid for a new front door since the old one had a hole rotted in the bottom almost big enough for a cat to get through. Then it was on to drywall, cleaning, and since my old house's lease was up: sleeping in the gutted shell of the new place. Waking up every morning with a nose full of drywall dust and no heat turns out to be a good motivator for getting to work.

My dad, me, roommate Justin, several of my friends, and some of my dad's friends and associates helped straighten out wiring, replaced every receptical and switch in the house, added a bigger circuit breaker panel, dropped the ceiling in the kitchen and hall to make room for central AC among other things, replaced ratty and chilly old windows (though there's still one left right now), and painted just about every surface in the house but the slab.

We also cut down and hauled out two big sycamore trees and a really big oak that had roots sticking several inches above most of the front yard, had ruined the driveway, and were threatening to do the same to the slab of the house though luckily it hadn't already. We also put up a privacy fence on the side of the house where the neighbors are a little too rowdy to want much to do with.

I also got two sets of 45 watt solar panel kits from Harbor Freight during the holiday sales and snagged a couple of nice big batteries from work as a storage bank, it's just sitting on the roof mounted to a pair of 2x4s. It's been working quite nicely and I've had my laptop and phone running on solar power ever since without running the batteries down even when it was cloudy several days.

And to top it all off the next and hopefully last big projects now that the house is starting to feel more like a home are to put a new roof on (and increase the pitch as well as change some other stuff about it), enclose the carport as a garage/workshop so I can finally stop working on things out in the weather and not have to worry about my tools walking off or getting wet, and turn the back porch into a master bath with attached laundry closet. Oh yeah, and we have to paint the outside once that's done. Still lots more to come, but holy hell it's come a long way already. Once I've got my workshop done up I should be able to more comfortably work on stuff, so stay tuned!

I Made a Terminator's Hand

2010-08-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine's birthday was coming up a few months ago and he remarked that it would be awesome if I could make him a terminator's hand as a birthday gift half-jokingly. I thought about for a few days off and on and eventually worked out that I could probably pull it off. I managed to get it done before his birthday and I think it came out very well. Everything's as close to proper scale as I could make it except and the sizes of parts are right about the same except where I simply didn't have the right materials to go with. Finding something similar to some of the parts made out of either stainless steel, chromed steel, or at least galvanized is hard. I did just so happen to have a nearly exact match for the ball joint in the wrist though. Here's the comparison of the real deal and what I made:

The whole thing took a lot of time, planning, grinding discs, little pieces, and having to go search around home depot and the flea market to find appropriate parts for finger joints and tendons.

I'm Making a Public Appearance

2010-08-04T05:50:00.001-07:00

After going to a couple local art shows and some encouraging words and praise from a few professional artists I've gotten a place to show off some of my stuff at the Downdown Jacksonville Art Walk. It's short notice, but I'll be out there between 5pm and 9pm today, so if you're not doing anything and would like to check out some of my stuff as well as paintings, music, and all sorts of pet-related stuff this time around. It's good times and you get discounts on the post-art-walk pub crawl after 9 if you save your flyer.

Come say hi and enjoy the rest of what's going on.

(PSST.... Over here... I'll also have some stuff I've been working on that I haven't had a chance to put on TheStuffIMade yet too, so come check it out before maybe it gets sold!)

I Made a Catapult

2010-07-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

One more thing to check off my bucket list, I now have both made and fired a piece of siege weaponry. A trebuchet to be exact. A couple of bed frames, bits of channel stock, a dirt bike chain, freon tank filled with water, an old rim, and some parts from a treadmill. The arm is on a ball bearing pivot and flings things ever so smoothly. The farthest shot thus far is about 60ft, but I'm hoping to improve that with a proper sling and a couple of heavy old batteries for the counterweight as soon as I get some from work. It's still a work in progress, but it's pretty awesome even as it sits now at roughly 12ft tall. Once I get it really tuned up maybe I'll post some videos. You can also see Mighty King Tiki Toki Tookie behind me too.

EDIT: I've vastly improved it with two large truck batteries for a counterweight and a sling instead of a simple hook. It now slings objects about 150ft. Also, BRIGHT GREEN!

I Made a Tiki Burn Barrel/Outdoor Fireplace/ Steel Drum

2010-07-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

This guy's pretty awesome if I do say so myself. Two propane bottles, a pile of bits and pieces from other stuff, and some thoughfully made slots in the top add up to Mighty King Tiki Toki Tookie!

There's a door in back to load in fuel for when you're enjoying his "roaring" flames with a stainless handle to keep it from getting insanely hot, a set of tongue drums cut into the crown of the head so the good king can be played for some interesting sounds similar to this, and a handle on top to make keeping him out of the way easy and less sooty.

After burning many a pine cone in him I wire-wheeled the paint off since it was mostly just dust by then anyway.

Please note, Mighty King iki Toki Tookie is best appeased with pine cone sacrifices rather than virgins.

I Made Dogs

2010-07-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

Nuts and bolts dogs, made the same way I do the model motorcycles. Burnt my left index finger pretty well on one of them. Springs are very hard to weld without melting them and I'm amazed it was so hard to find 8 matching bolts of the right size when I have so many that are all very close.

I Made a Bigger Motor Fit

2010-06-23T06:09:00.000-07:00

Got a new toy recently on craigslist. A Chinese clone of a Honda SS50 that hadn't been run for over a year and had a broken sprocket hub on the rear wheel, but was all still intact otherwise.

I got it home, got it to start roughly just on the old gas left in it, and called it a night. The next day I went to the local motorcycle junkyard CycoCycle, and managed to scrounge up a close match to my broken hub, only it was cast with about twice the aluminum and looked much sturdier. After getting it fitted and installed I managed a shaky and sputtery ride around the yard with the motor jumping around under my feet.

One cleaned carb, properly replaced engine anchor bolt, fresh oil, a newly fabricated chain tensioner, fresh gas, a new fuse, cleaned fuse holder, and a new battery, and I had it running..... WORSE. Actually it was running much better, but I'd managed to lose the carb settings while cleaning it, and couldn't manage to get it idling properly. It would get up to 40MPH without trouble, but that's all it had. Not bad for about $150 invested in it including gas and oil, but I was wanting more and not wanting to mess with tuning a carburetor if I could help it.

I went online to Planetminis.com and found a nice looking 110cc motor that looked like just the trick and got it for a decent price with the carb and all pulled right off a running bike. A few days later I dropped the original motor and heaved the heftier 110 in place. Then all I lacked was finishing.

Finishing turned out to be a little more involved than I originally planned for. I had to rewire the stator plug from the original (my cheapo 12v impact wrench was fantastic for this), pulling the flywheel to make sure I matched the correct wires to the original plug. I then installed a fuel cutoff valve since the original was MIA, swapped the original motor's drive sprocket on, installed the throttle cable, and was then struck with some problems:

* No spark
* Clutch cable won't reach on new motor
* Mounting bracket hole for muffler doesn't line up
* Foot pegs won't fit between bigger motor and exhaust pipe

I wound up having to figure out the pinout for the gear indicator light, which also acted as a kill switch if the bike wasn't in Neutral when kicked over. After that was sorted I just wired the N pin to ground and wrote "ON" over the neutral light. Now I won't forget the key in there! :P

The clutch cable wasn't too hard to fix. It would have had the same amount of travel even with the right cable, it just needed to be a couple inches longer. After sizing up the situation I ground a notch in the side of a bolt, welded a nail to it, and slipped it in place between clutch arm and clutch cable. Works perfectly!

The muffler mount just needed a notch cut in it so it could slide far enough forward to meet up with the slightly longer motor and still meet up with the bracket's bolt hole.

The foot peg was a serious pain. After trying to shave down some meat to make it fit for about an hour so I wouldn't lose the proper positioning of the peg I gave up, lopped the original right peg off before it bowed up to hit the motor, and welded a new bit of steel rod sticking out while it was all bolted in place so I knew it'd have to fit cursing and burning myself with the welder the whole way. I then eyeballed the foot peg and welded it in place, putting solid beads in with it all in my vice so I wouldn't have to curse and burn myself as much. After that it slides in place great through.

Now on a test run through the neighborhood I can get it up to 50 and I'm guessing it'll make it between 55 and 58 on the open road. Once I toss an air filter on there I'm not sure if I'll sell it or keep it around and put new tires on it. It's very fun to drive and is nimble enough to almost treat like a dirt bike.

I Made Motorcycles

2010-05-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well, a model of a motorcycle anyway. Gears, a ball bearing, and some various hardware bits combined to make this fine little bike. I forgot to add foot pegs and exhaust pipes, but I may go back and do that. To give credit where credit's due, I got the idea from these guys in Thailand. They're really talented. It's about 20cm (8") long.

Edit: Made this one too.

I Made a Bicycle

2010-04-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

Barbara gave me the steel frame of an old "Romana" brand bike. It's very proudly Italian according to the stickers on it. Seems like it's a 70's era department store bike. It was basically a frame, crank, and bearingless fork when I got it. After a bouncy and bangy ride in the back of my work van and showing it off to Daniel I got to work around 6PM trying to get it road-worthy. Over the next three hours I did the following:

* Unscrewed the top of the head tube
* Figured out it had no bearings at all
* Broke down the bars, bar tube, and fork from another bike for parts
* took parks from original forks and parts bike to bodge together a working bearing/hardware set
* Pumped up spare tires, found front has a bad tube
* Tried temporarily fitting another front wheel, holds air but tire too big
* Pulled tube, put in correct sized front wheel using butter knife handles for tire tools
* Found out front fork is a little crooked, still in an adjustable and usable range
* Put on rear wheel
* Borrowed chain from my trusty, rusty, squeeky, creeky, blue bike
* Tightened the handlebars, stuck the brake (minus seat and brake pads since they didn't fit well) on and rode around the yard and sidewalk a minute to see if everything was holding up
* Pulled the most road-bike looking seat from my junked kids bikes I use for welding material
* Ground the gap in the seat post clamp wider so it could properly clamp
* Installed and adjusted seat
* Cut a brake mount tube from junk bike, welded in place under the bike's original mount. Cleaned and painted to avoid rust.
* Installed brake caliper
* Made brake cable from two short broken cables with a bolt, washers, and nut in the middle to hold it together
* Rode it up and down the road some to see what needed adjustment
* Adjusted a few things.

Annnd.....

Tossed bike in my car, rode downtown to watch Anderdown do their thing. I rode it around the Veterans Memorial Arena and it's parking garage a little after the guys had played and it's smooth riding and feels very narrow to ride on. Up next I'll strip it back down, toss on some new brake pads, maybe or maybe not weld in a kick stand mount, clean up the chrome, and re-paint the frame and fork, and re-assemble the whole thing. Not a bad bike for 3 hours of work and some parts that were slated for the scrap pile otherwise I'd say though. More pics to come as I get more done.

UPDATE 4-28-10:
I got some silver hammered paint and after some sanding, grinding, wire-wheeling, and taping I've got the bike looking pretty good. I went with a flat handlebars and brake handle since I'm not one for using drops and the drop bars I had were too narrow for me. I need to replace the rear axle bearings since they're pretty shot, add bar wrap, new brake pads, and clean up the wheels, but to have under $7 invested in it so far I'm very happy with it.

Frame prepped for paint.

Glamor shot in the front yard.

Detail of the orange bands and crank.

I Made a Jacob's Ladder

2010-04-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

Found an old oil HV transformer at the local junk shop "Shep's". Hooked it up with some hardware from mega-lo-hardware and made this nice Jacob's ladder.

I made "art"?

2010-04-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

Found a piece of particleboard and used some 1x3 boards I charred with a torch along with spray paint, gears, other bits of stuff, and not much talent to make what you see above. Good? Great? Art? Trash? Terrible? Just silly? Who knows. It was pretty fun to make though. I might keep adding to it to see what I can come up with. Anyone know of a genetic algorithm for spray painting?

I Made (another) box

2010-04-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think living in an apartment would be nice. No mowing, raking, or other yard work, you get better heating and cooling because of the neighbors upstairs and next to you helping insulate your rooms. But then I realize I wouldn't have room and space to make things, and that apartment dwellers have to part with some pretty cool stuff because they're either not handy enough or don't care enough to do anything with it.

I was stopping by my buddy Mike's place yesterday to watch a movie and saw such a thing in their appartment's free-for-all junk pile. I've gotten angle iron (bed frames) and lumber pieces from there several times, but this time there was a couple of wine displays someone had tossed. A Cruzan Rum display box, and an unmarked 1x2 shelf held together with brads and glue, but with a few pieces fallen off. Looked like they'd go together well to make a nice box.

My neighbor Mitch let me make use of his table and miter saw while he regailed me of his nearly causing an international incident between the US and USSR with a cardboard tube pointed at a Russian helicopter when he worked in the navy. I cut down the 1x4s and bradded them in place. I reused the box's display holder for the front after ripping it thinner. Rope handles on the sides and it's all nice and clean looking. Now what to keep in it?.....

I Made an Archer

2010-04-08T20:02:00.000-07:00

It's been a long while since I got my welder and since then I've gotten a good deal better at using it and know what works well with. I've also gotten my scrap pile back up in size and there's been some nice goodies on it from sources as different as the woods behind my house and the local Harley Davidson dealership. Three of the best pieces to it were a pair of slightly scraped up exhaust pipes and a chunk of a motorcycle frame that reminded me of a slender torso.

I'd been thinking about getting a decent bow and arrow set to practice and get some stress off with, and with a pair of pipes that looked like a set of legs and a chunk of frame that looked rather like a fit chest, I decided that those and some motorcycle handlebars could be used to make a nice sculpture of an archer. I figured a human figure would be pretty cool to make and since I just so happen to be in such a shape myself I also had a decent pattern to go on too. As I was making it there were countless little moments I'd check the angles and shapes of things I'd done against how I'd do them myself. This photo of myself (taken by Bri Miller) was actually very useful in getting the positions of the arms right. I hadn't realized the drawing arm was basically turned upside down before seeing myself doing it.

As with the dinosaur, I started from the feet and worked my way up. The feet are made of hardware from a garage door with their angles and positioning modeled with my own as a rough reference. The left arm is a truck jack, and the right arm uses a small shock absorber to spring back and hold tension on the bicycle chain that is the bowstring.

The head was easily the most difficult part to make. I didn't have anything that already looked something like a head, so I had to find all sorts of little bits and burn my hands holding them in place while I tacked them together. having on welding gloves made it too awkward to not let some parts slip. I especially like the way the eyes came out. One is part of a bicycle's crank and the other is a ball joint from a car's steering rack.

The fingers were all made from motorcycle chain. #420 for fingers and #428 for the thumbs. The arrow head was the only part made from plain stock specifically to look like it does.

When it was all said and done, I moved the archer off of the temporary wooden base I made for him and welded up a steel base made of railroad tie plates my friend Barbra gave me and an old motorcycle highway bar with a nice twist in it. I also ran over the whole archer with a wire wheel to get the bulk of it's rust off and sprayed it all down with some gloss clear coat. He's looking pretty snazzy in the front yard now taking aim at passing cars, bikes, and one bright orange dinosaur.

Barbra also came by to see the archer and take some very nice photos of it just after the first sun-shower of the year. The first photo of this post is one of hers in face. They came out very nicely and you should definitely check out those any other stuff of hers here ,here ,and here. She also did a nice backdropped photo of my orange dinosaur here.

I Made a Wave

2010-03-20T21:16:00.000-07:00

Whilst perusing one of my favorite news sites, I came across this post, which I showed to my roommate, and after we'd agreed on it's awesomeness, we also decided to see if we could re-create it. Bed sheets, a former toga, and loads of white laundry in various stages of clean went together with the smallest surf board in the house. It's not as pristine as the waters in the original photo, but Jacksonville's surf is never that clear anyway. Putting it together was fun, but next time we do this (if we do it again) we'll use a better camera and lighting.

The "I'm a surfing wizard" one is from user Transfuse on Reddit. Pretty funny compared to the original.

I Made More Things (and took pics with my phone)

2010-02-24T18:38:00.000-08:00

A clock from goodwill that I replaced the face of with a Enameled Mustang sign. The rivets make nice points for 12,3,6, and 9. I made it for my roommate Daniel.

ROYGBIV. I noticed we had shampoo, body wash, and conditioner bottles of enough colors to set them up in a rainbow pattern

I rebuilt a drill battery for my brother Roger at work. His old one makes a great example of why you shouldn't let your drill batteries get wet.

I made this little cabin with my nephew James a few years ago. It's about 1'x1'x1.5' in size. We got the rough edges by splitting up some old 1x6 lumber scraps. It makes a nice frog house at my dad's house.

I Made Up My Own Alphabet

2009-11-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

I was looking at the pattern of some leaves painted on the back of someone's shirt in a class the other day and decided to mimic the strokes the leaves needed to be drawn with. The resulting stuff looked like it might fit in with various Asian calligraphy systems. It got me thinking on written language some. I figured it would be neat to come up with my own writing system, but knowing only english and the Latin alphabet fluently enough to try my hand making something new, I decided that rather than make an entirely new character, grammar, and word system (Ala-Esperanto) I'd just figure out a better way to do English writing.

What could possibly make English an even better language to write in than it already is I hear everyone say (aside from poorly sticking to rules, exceptions to pronunciation and conjugation that drive that make a phone book on their own, etc....), well obviously the Latin alphabet! There are many letters that can be too easily confused and with good punctuation you have little need for capital and lower-case letters rather than simply a letter. I decided there were some things that could be done to improve things:

* Cut down or eleminate letters and numbers that are indistinguishable when written with less than stellar or quick penmanship (no more 1,I, and l or U and V looking too similar when you're quickly jotting things down).
* Keep the per-character stroke count down. No need for a 20-stroke chinese character when a couple simple slashes will do.
* Avoid conflicting with english and numerical punctuation and notation (the + sign is easy to do, but will conflict with universal math language
* Avoid wasting simple to write characters on infrequently used letters (X is easy, but how often do you use it?)
* Try to keep parity with the Latin alphabet whenever possible (not a huge deal, but why reassign L to another letter without a good reason?)

Anywho, I messed around with making characters that applied to these rules and then assigned them places in either the 0-9 number set or the A-Z letter set, and this is what I came up with. The numbers make it easy to at a glance figure out where you are from 1-9 and the letters could be scrawled as poorly as possible and you'd still be able to tell what was meant. Anyway, it looks pretty geometric and neat so I may or may not try to memorize how to read and write in it. Maybe just a nice font for writing in it would be in order?

I've been making things

2009-10-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

It's been a little while since I posted last. That's been somewhat to do with changing jobs a couple times, working between 40 and 75 hours a week, and now going to school while dealing with other stuff that life's been tossing at me like barrels down an 8-bit ramp. Fortunately for my questionably existent viewers here, I've been making things other than ends meeting as of late as well. Here's they am.

Sock Monkey:
There were far too many socks that were worn to paper thin or full of holes and they were piling up, so I decided to make a sock monkey from them. A proper and classic sock monkey calls for some basic sewing and cloth working skills and either a lot of free time or a sewing machine. Being as I don't have a sewing machine, but I do have a hot glue gun I made use of the latter to fashion and attach his various body parts. He's stuffed with socks. Daniel's more or less claimed him now so I guess sock monkey's a success!

Pit Bike Bodgery and Robbery:
A couple months ago I'd done some horse-trading with someone for a 110cc Chinese dirt bike and a lot of extra parts. It ran fantastically, but was pretty wimpy in the slowing down department. The old owner had plenty of brake gear to be cobbled together, but hadn't gotten around to putting it all together, so I did. I ground the caliper mount off of the stock small swing arm and welded it an a piece of angle iron into place on the nicer swing arm. I also had to put the brake rotor on, requiring some fastener scavenging from the extra parts bin as well, which also required me to put a bottle jack in the swing arm to stretch it wide enough to fit the rear wheel back in after prying it out. Unfortunately, after a quick spray of paint and a few days of work, someone stole the bike right out of my back yard along with a Honda XR70 I was rebuilding the motor for from the extra two motors I was given for my brother and nephew, so I never got to properly bleed and test the lines. I had big plans for franken-bikng a scooter front end and the pit bike's back end together for a pretty funky little ride. Whoever stole it better hope I don't catch them.

RABBIT HOUSE!:
The old rabbit pen has seen better days, and was probably more a danger to the rabbits than their escaping it's confines, so I decided it was time to rebuild it with some nicer materials. I went to [home improvement gigantorium] and found that they'd left me some slightly warped porch railing for 51c per ~4ft piece. Add to that a bucket of oops isle grey and a couple boxes of nails and I was all set. The pen is almost the same dimensions as the old one, about 6'x6'.

The old cage material was reused, as were a few of the 2x2s and the chain link bottom of the cage. The frame went together pretty easily, and with some scabbed together pieces the ~4' rails spanned the 6' width of the cage nicely. for the roof beam I bolted tow pieces together with a red oak scab and shingled the whole thing with corrugated plastic signs that were in a neighbor's recycle bin. I accidently made the design capable of still watering the grass in the pen (as well as any rabbits that may be within it) by laying the shingles down from the top working my way down rather than from bottom to top. Ohh well, the rabbit's don't go out when it's rainy anyway.

The door is made of the frame of my homemade rabbit pen's bottom since the pen has been replaced lately, and a couple of small eye bolts, a 2" bolt, and a nut make a latch on the inside to let you go in without fear of the door swinging open. This would undoubtedly leave the neighborhood flooding in 3' of rabbits.

Music-upon-opening Ammo Can:
I've been wanting to plant a Geocache somewhere for some time, but not wanting to just plant any boring ammo can in an out of the way place, I decided to make it so when it's opened it'll play some music. I had just such a birthday card laying around from last year, so I gutted the card of it's speaker and circuit board, soldered the contact points for the card's switch to the points on an old telco relay which had a nice leaf switch to it. This was all then glued into the side of a normal ammo can with a large plastic nub to hold the relay switch open when the can't closed. The small speaker vibrating with the whole side of the can as it's speaker "cone" really lets it get loud.

Super Spotlight:
My new (and hopefully permanent for some time to come) job is working retail and tech work for Batteries Plus here in town. This has already afforded me a couple good opportunities to snag some still functional batteries which would otherwise have been discarded. One such set was 6 lead acid batteries around the size of D cells. I decided that together they would make a great flood light power source, so I put them together and shrink wrapped the whole thing for a nice 12v, 2.5AH battery. To give it something to power I got a $10 12v, 20W garden spot light from [the large construction supply house which shall remain nameless to protect the accused] and proceeded to cut the spiked bottom off of it. The two together will run for around an hour before the light is noticably more dim and the working voltage starts to get kinda puny. Cool thing is it's as bright as a car's headlight, so I might mount it to my bike some how or maybe I'll just come up with a nice casing for it all that won't melt from the lamp's heat.

Toga:
I did manage to find myself at a toga party for my roommate's friend, but finding ourselves short on ancient grec0-roman attire, we went to the store and each got 6 yards of cloth. I got a nice dark orange. It's pretty easy to do, just sling it around your waist, throw it over your shoulder, and tie off any extra like a belt to keep the whole thing in place. Feel free to play where's Waldo with me in that photo.

Hammock:
With all that's been going on I've been needing somewhere to relax. The evenings are getting just about bearable, and with a few days of nice cold snap I decided to repurpose my toga as a hammock. Two pieces of rope with loops on the end knots tied in the ends of the orange cloth and I was all set. I've since replaced the orange cloth with some nice flannel since it's stretchier, softer, and stronger. I just slip the knots out of the ends and carry the cloth inside when I'm done so I don't have to worry about a wet butt when I go out to read or chill out.

I Made Meatloaf Cupcakes

2009-06-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

I like meatloaf. I like cupcakes. I'm not sure where I got the idea, but making cupcakes from meatloaf sounded good to me. They're easy enough to make. Just mix meatloaf mix with ground beef, mold it into a cupcake pan, and make sure to shape them so that they look like finished, risen cupcakes. Cook it on 450F for 15 minutes and make some mashed potatoes to use as "icing". When they're done be careful not to have a lot of the oil from the meat slosh around.

They probably don't look so great, but they're delicious. Maybe next time they'll look better.

I Made Counter Space

2009-06-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Since the first time I saw my current house, I've liked with one exception. There's not a lot going on for counter space. There's a decent space between the stove and counter that's a prime spot for some more flat space, but since the place is rented I can't just go attaching things to the wall all willy-nilly. I thought about a table, but there would be a cabinet door blocked off if you put a normal one there. There was only one thing for it, I had to make more room.

After a trip to Indoor Lumber Yards and Conglomerate Hardware Stores Anonymous I had 3 pine 2x4"s and a pine tabletop cut to fit the space betwix the counter and stove. When I got home it was pretty hot (close to 100F in the sun) and I was feeling antsy, so I cut parts to make the table with four legs quickly and went inside to assemble it.

The next day my room mates brought up that our rabbits tend to eat food when given the chance, and that with a table leg in the way their bag of food wasn't too easy to get to. Today I remedied that problem (much to the rabbit's and room mate's appreciation) by taking apart the whole thing, recutting most of the pieces, adding diagnonal braces, and ultimately elimingating the offending leg. It's now got two legs on one side, and the build of a school desk on the other. I also screwed down the top, filled the screw holes with wood putty, and coated the whole top in some olive oil so as to avoid staining so easily.

The whole thing is cheap to make, very sturdy, looks pretty nice, and is really useful. Usually I only manage to get two or three of those.

Also, I have a new Flickr account just for The Stuff I Made. http://www.flickr.com/photos/thestuffimade There are some more photos of this there.

I made light (and a ladder)

2009-04-14T18:17:00.000-07:00

Electric bills suck. So does wasting power using more light than you need to. I try to light the house by sunlight whenever possible, but when there's a mid-sized planet between the giver of free light and my windows this becomes more difficult. Since I had a few battery and some 12v lights around though I figured all I needed was a solar panel and I could harvest the power of that giant burning gravity well for my nocturnal illumination.

All five dollar words and odd perspective aside though, I've come up with a pretty straightforward solar setup for my bathroom and reading lamp. I have a small 1.5 watt solar panel up on my roof held down with 3m tape with a wire run to my room on the other side of the house held down by duct tape (renting a house makes permanent mounting unideal) Then the wire runs to the charge controller that came with the solar cell into either a 12v car jump start pack or a pack of two 7.2AH lead gel cell batteries in series with a switched car accessory adapter on it. The batteries are manually swapped every other day to keep them well charged.

Then the batteries feed lights. I have a simple 10w 12v car work light in the bathroom and a desk lamp with another 10w 12v light. They're not going to blind anyone, but for reading a book or getting a shower or going to the loo at night they're plenty bright.

Also, I needed a ladder to get up to the roof, but I didn't have one. Having already blown my (nonexistent) budget on the solar panel itself and knowing I don't really need a ladder often I set out to make one. I did have some sisal rope, nails, and some decent sized oak saplings around the house in the woods, so I made a pretty rickety but serviceable ladder from them. I'm hoping once the wood dries and shrinks some I can rebuild it and have it more sturdy than with the current green wood. I'll probably reclaim my lag bolts from my dad at some point to hold it all together as well. I'm still sure OSHA would have a fit even then though.

In the future I'd like to mount a larger 5 watt solar cell on the roof as well since they're only twice the price of a 1.5 watt cell, run the charger to both packs at once, and make the wiring and power switch for the bathroom more cleanly run. It takes 6 2/3 hours to recharge for every hour of use with my current setup. Replacing the lamps with LED lamps or adding a larger solar panel would make that better, but for my current use it's enough.

I Made a High Security Bunny Pen

2009-02-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

My previous rabbit pen was something of a flop. It was made of fencing that had rabbits on the name and in pictures on the package. In a week we lost one rabbit, had one jump out and get caught, and had the rabbits look awfully comfy with jumping "rabbit fence" height stuff. A nice big rabbit pen doesn't do much good when you can't leave the rabbits in it.

Anywhatzit, I took the pen down, cut the wide-spaced parts out, and made a smaller 6'x6' pen with an open side for the cage to sit beside and smaller spacing on the sides. I also put a top on it with paneling and some saplings so they can't get out.

Anyway, unless they start digging out they should be pretty well contained.

(UPDATE)
They tried to dig out. Their escape attempt seemed to be aimed more toward China than outside the pen. The cotton-tailed miners didn't seem fazed by my explaining that digging straight down would only lead to molten rock and eventually the southern part of the Indian Ocean, so I was forced to pull out a piece of chain link fence for a bottom to the pen. They can still sniff and eat the grass through it and can relax on hay I put in there as well. Waskawy wabbits.

I Made Loud Shoes

2009-01-09T21:23:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered what the Japanese used for footwear prior to western imperialism brought Adidas to the land of the rising sun? Me neither, but after noticing some odd raised wooden sandals in a couple TV shows worn by characters from such a time I looked into it and discovered "geta". Geta is the name of wooden Japanese sandals which are traditionally made of wood and are raised on two blocks (called teeth or ha). There was a time when the streets of Tokyo would have been alive with the clacking of people doing their thing in these shoes, and there are stores from elders who have fond memories of the din of people walking about in these.

There are tall geta for when it rains, different designs for men and women, and many variations from simple to elegant. I never knew I'd get so interested in a pair of shoes but here I am. I decided that it would be neat to have a custom-made pair of geta and when I stumbled into an online calculator for the measurements you need I printed out my measurements and the printout sat in my school folder for some months. I pulled it out yesterday though and went about getting a pair made.

They're a pretty simple piece of footwear to look at them: flat rectangular sole, two ha and a cloth thong to keep it on your foot. As with many things though the devil's in the details. The distance from the front ha to the tip of the geta gives you the lean your foot needs in stride since the sole doesn't bend with the foot so this measure is important, as is the height of the ha, width, length, and placement of the thong. With normal flip-flops, the thong is placed where the big toe is, but it's in the middle on geta. This lets it shift to the side while walking and keeps the square backs of the shoes from hitting one another with each step.

Anyway, on to the pair I made. They're red oak, cut to size and glued with 1/2" red oak dowel drilled and glued into ha and sole to firmly tie them together. The thong is made of nylon rope core for strength. If I make any more it will be with a 1/2" sole since the 1" red oak sole is much thicker than needed.

I made an instructable detailing the whole build so check it out if you'd like more detail on how to make a pair.

I Made a Dinosaur

2009-01-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

After getting pretty decent with a welder, and seeing my scrap pile behind the shed grow large enough to support making something interesting, I set about making something from the cornucopia of scrap steel I'd collected.

I had a rough idea of a bipedal dinosaur or dragon in mind, but no specific plan or places for pieces in mind (points for alliteration?). I began with the legs, using the welder to very inefficiently cut the metal that would become the legs, then welded the feet to the base, held the ankle/lower legs in place, and tacked them down. Then I did the same for the femurs. I added the back right over the legs, then worked on the basic back outline, adding reinforcements to the tack welds and making sure to keep the whole thing balanced.

Once I had the basic body shape done, I started adding more detail like the ribs, toe claws, and leg pieces. To shape the curve of the tail, spine, and other larger parts, I simply beat dents into strategic parts of the piece, then hit it on a tree to get the curve I needed, which wasn't a very forgiving process on the hands even in welding gloves. While doing all the welding and grinding on paint and rust I got plenty of odd and scared looks from the rabbits in their pen.

I then needed to decide how to make the head and whether to make a dragon's wings or a dinosaur's arms. Since my stockpile was getting somewhat puny I decided to go for the latter, using drawer rails with locking latches to give the arms some range of motion. Then I began working on the head.

The head consists of some steering linkage, a bumper mount from, a rack-mountable spacer for the lower jaw, pieces from a lawn-ornament of a happy little man that had wound up on my neighbor's trash, and some political sign supports for teeth along with other bits of scrap. The tilt of the piece the head bolts to makes it lean to the left, which looks good with the rest of the t-rex's posture. After riding around for a couple days with it strapped into the bed of my truck I'm not sure what to do with it, so it stands guard at the front door for now.

EDIT 4-17-10:
Since making him, the steel dinosaur has seen music and art, and has also had a few color changes. Daniel and the guys of the band Anderdown (of which I was part at the time) brought "ROFL-saurus" to a show at Jacksonville's downtown art walk when we played. ROFL-saurus may have gotten more compliments than the music.

Some time after that I painted him brown and black to keep him from rusting too badly, but when Halloween came along I decided it was time for a more seasonal color. BRIGHT ORANGE! He had a few problems with the toes being too thin and breaking off, so recently as I was working on the archer my friend Barbara brought me some railroad spikes and tie plates. The spikes worked out great for new super-sturdy toes and with a fresh lick of orange pain to match things up ROFL-saurus is gracing the front yard, being stalked by the ever-steady aim of the archer and getting funny looks from the neighbors. Barbara was even awesome enough to come take and put together some nicely backdropped photos photos of the archer and dinosaur.

I Made Stuff for Rabbits

2008-12-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

The other day I got a bunny, so did my roommates. They needed a place to chillax and do whatever rabbits do like poop and run away from anything that moves or makes sound (supposedly they'll get more relaxed within the week), so I got some short pen fencing from [Giant hardware emporium] and some 2x2 poles and made a pen.

With a 50ft section of fence I decided to make each side 12' long, which leaves a little extra for future patches or mess-ups during making it. I cut the poles about 1 1/2' longer than the height of the fencing, then hammered them into the ground in a square shape. I used some baling wire to hold the first end to one of the poles and brought it around each corner, trying to make sure the fencing stayed as taut as possible and bringing the bends to a square corner at the corners. Next I hammered 1' stakes into the ground at an angle to the poles, drilled holes in the tops of the stakes and poles, then tied lines through each pole down to the stake as tightly as I could to prevent the poles from sagging inward. I also hammered the stakes down flush with the ground to tighten them up some more, and help mitigate the trip hazard.

To give them some shade and cover I took a couple of metal cans and some paneling to make a lean-to for them. All seemed pretty well the first couple days and we got comfortable letting them hang out on their own for decent amounts of time, but the more skittish of the two (Bonnie) managed to push her way under the mesh and made a break for the woods when we tried to catch her. After an all-day hunt, some close calls, and a couple of days waiting for her to find her way into a trap it appears she's gone for good. The wooden box shown is my less-than-stellar trap. Maybe I didn't bait it properly. I didn't even catch a squirrel or raccoon.

I improved the pen with some metal hooks to keep the bottom tight to the ground, but the other rabbit (Dyna) also made an escape attempt; I assume by climbing over a corner. Between myself an my neighbor (thanks Mitch!) I got her back by tossing a blanket over her. My friends Mike and Sabrina got us a new rabbit I've dubbed Trillian and she and Dyna are currently making noise in the kitchen. They only get to go into the pen when there's someone around to make sure they don't cause trouble or make a break for it.

When we first got Trill she Dyna didn't take too kindly to her presence, so I had to make a separate cage for Trill. I cut some pieces of hardware cloth to about the same size as Dyna's cage, made a paneling and 2x2 base for it, and zip tied the whole thing together. It's not as good as a store-bought cage since she can toss bedding out pretty easy, but it's still nice and she won't need it forever since they'll eventually bond well enough to share a cage.

When they're in the house they need to stay in the kitchen so they can do as they like without the risk of pooping or chewing on things they shouldn't (or which our landlord wouldn't appreciate). To this end I made a couple of bunny gates for the two entryways to the kitchen. One is made from our good friends pre-finished hardwood flooring and 2x2s. That gate is just a couple 2x2s of the same height as the pen with planks of flooring nailed to it with gaps just smaller than the head of a small rabbit. The other is a baby gate Mitch was nice enough to pass my way with an added piece on either side to make it fit the wider of the two entries.

What I've learned is that rabbits need you to either spend lots of money on them to keep them happy and safe or they prompt lots of making things to do those things.

I Made GIFs

2008-12-01T17:09:00.000-08:00

A while ago I got hella bored at work, and while wondering what to do with a super-cheap digital camera I had and an Optimus Prime plushie I decided to make a GIF with him. I taped up the camera between a box and a chair and set to work making a stop motion GIF of him walking up, transforming, and rolling out. I bumped the camera once, which kinda spoiled the effect of him doing it seemlesly over and over, but it still looks pretty neat.

I also made another GIF of some coax cable connectors playing Romeo and Juliet. Can't you just see the starcrossed love between them? I forgot which program I used to string the photos together into a moving GIF, but it was pretty hard to find one that didn't require a good bit of skill and didn't plaster a watermark all over the end result without paying for it as you can see in one of the gifs it decided to do. I should have written down the second program I used

I Made Metal Stick to Metal

2008-11-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

I decided to give my new welder a go recently. It's a
small 110v flux-core wire welder and it's pretty handy for anything under 1/4". Anyway, after my dad giving me his old spare set of welding gloves and an old welding mask I struck some arcs and gave it a go.

A few years ago dad had me try welding on a small trailer that needed some work. The results were a "porcupine" of welding wire as he put it, so I figured I'd have to do better this time. After getting a feel for making a few beads on a piece of scrap and burning my name through a piece of thin sheet metal, I decided to try something more substantial. Taking a pile of steel scrap I had around, I fashioned it into an arm that moves at the elbow. While half-way through working on it my roommate ordered pizza and I had to go sign for the it. The delivery guy almost fell over when I walked up with the mask, welding jacket, and one glove still on.

I also made a small metal bracket from some political yard sign metal (the same as the fingers on the arm) for my room mate so his new air filter can bolt up properly and not wear holes int itself. it's pretty much just a rod with a loop on each end welded so a bold could go through.

Once I'd finished the arm and bracket I felt more confident with my welds not falling apart, so I gave a shot at making a work bench. It's made of some metal shipping crate frame that I held together with baling wire while I tacked it together. It's pretty self explanatory to look at it, and sits pretty solidly, but I wish I'd had a magnetic square, as the corners are nowhere near square. Ohh well, it'll still work nicely. The table top is just chipboard and I painted the whole thing so it won't rust or peel too badly. I'm probably going to make it so I can bolt my Skil-Saw to it and use it as a table saw. I'd also like to get a vice mounted to it as well. At the moment the whole thing is just holding up my

I Made a Robo-Archaeopteryx

2008-11-09T18:08:00.000-08:00

Though it's not complete yet, I figured this is neat looking enough to warrant making a post for now. My room mate got an itch to build a model of a P51-D mustang. He coaxed me into getting a model to make as well. I remember making a model or two growing up, but never got too into it since I always knew what I was going to wind up with in the end and they never seemed to give you much choice in variation. I was into Lego though since once you'd made what was on the box you could recombine it any way you liked. I wound up recombining the parts from a kit into some odd things, and figured this would be fun to do with the my models as well.

I got kits for a 69 Z/28 Camaro and a Huey Vietnam War era helicopter. I used superglue to hold it all together, setting out the parts and looking over them for things that might shape together. The times I've made models like this I've never been too sure what I was working toward at the start, and just started to put together larger pieces. What I wound up with was a bird-life thing that looks pretty similar to an archeopteryx, an early ancestor of birds. I'm still planning to add more detail and paint the whole thing, but for the moment it still looks pretty neat, so here it is. There are some more photos on a Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ironleg/sets/72157608803206197/

I Made a Bridge and Stairs

2008-11-04T05:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday and today I got an itch to go to the other side of the big ditch behind my back yard, but wasn't able to since the big ditch has about a 12ft wide stream in it with little fish and frogs and all. I manages to score some nice 2x4 lumber and fashioned myself a bridge to cross the gap. It's pretty self-explanatory; two 12' boards on end toenailed to the 4x4s they're sitting on, then planks of 2x4 over those for the deck. On the other side it turns out there's a fire trail that runs about a quarter mile in one direction and about 3/4 mile in the other, with trails to the side leading into the woods. It's a good place to go exploring. After making my little bridge though I decided the incline on the other side was too steep to keep scrambling up it every time I go over there, so today I made some stairs to make going up a little easier.

They're pretty simple, just start at the top, dig out the first step, shoveling the excess dirt down to where the next step will be, pound a line of steaks into where the face of the first step will be, then tamp down the ground in the first step and repeat for the next step. Filling in the backfill with sticks as well as the dirt should hopefully prevent some erosion, and for some of the steps I just put in a few steaks with flat boards behind them. We'll see which type fares better over time I guess. Make sure the steaks are about twice as long as the step is tall to give them plenty of room to hold into the ground without tilting forward.

I was thinking about making the bridge able to winch up onto my side so it's not abused or broken by someone, I might have to re-visit this if I do so. There are more photos over on this Flickr set.

And one more thing. It's November 4th, GO VOTE AMERICA! THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS!

I Made Some Halloween Stuff (on the cheap)

2008-10-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated for a while because I've been moving into a new house, but now that we're moved in and I've got some free time with Halloween coming up I decided it was time to make some decorations. I've got more details over on Instructables. A giant spider web, spooky fence, grave stones, and a dead guy made of expanding foam await you here if you dare. The whole thing was done on a shoestring budget since I'm not one to break the bank for something that'll be up under a week. Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!

I Made a Skeleton With a Scandanavian Accent

2008-10-23T20:34:00.001-07:00

With Halloween coming up and my roommates and I hosting our first ever party, we were looking to do some decorations. I got one of those plastic skeletons in a box, but he was pretty generic other than a rather happy look on his face. Is it a face? I'm not sure. His mandible looks happy at least. Anyway, this reminded us of the key holding skeletons from The Legend of Neil. The other day Bri (roommate and Daniel's girlfriend) got a rather large metal key, with no specific purpose for it in mind. As we had the skeleton though and it seemed to remind us of the show, we remembered the key and decided that he must have been a snarky, murderous, and Scandinavian skeleton who was "gay for deals".

Anywhichwhats, It's a plastic skeleton, a piece of shirt sleeve nailed on as a mustache, a wooden sword taped to his hand, and a hook holding the key in place with a cardboard word bubble. We're debating whether he's a halloween fixture or more permanent.

I Made My Niece and Nephews Have Fun, and Make Things

2008-10-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

I feel it's my duty to pass the spark of taking things apart, hoarding random interesting bits of things, and fixing things that others would simply toss to the next generation. Since I don't have kids of my own yet to pass this trait onto I practice on my brother's kids and their friends. To their friends I'm usually introduced to their friends as "uncle Ronnie, the one I told you makes all those weird things". I'm not sure how many kids I'm not the uncle of I'm uncle Ronnie to. It's kinda cool.

Anyway, on the way to work today I picked up a Razor electric kids chopper from someone's trash. The speed controller and batteries were long gone, but those are always the first things to die in these cheapie kids' rides and the drive train was still there. When the yung-uns came over this afternoon and saw this they wanted to know immediately if I could make it work and if we could do so before they left. It was already kinda late, but when my youngest niece came in and asked I couldn't say no. So I set them all to work helping to get it functional. My nephew holding wires and helping solder, his friend grabbing, stripping, and cutting wires, and my little niece testing that the beefy power switch made it go once it was all together. I used a couple mismatched, but fairly equal capacity batteries I had around for power, and we were ready to go. This was all frantic as it was already past dark and they were worried they'd be headed home at any moment.

We aired up the front tire with my air compressor, grabbed a flashlight for a headlight, and they rode it up and down the dirt road a few times on whatever power the batteries had. They had fun and I also got the chance to teach them about basic electronics, soldering (using my 40 year old 200w soldering iron), the precautions to be taken with big batteries (after shorting together the batteries in loop), and they were really having a good time trying to beat the clock and bring the little chopper to life. It's a squirrly little ride that ought to be on paved cul-de-sac rather than dusty dirt road, but it's fun none the less and I think they had more fun getting it running than from actually running it. We'll see if that changes when I get the batteries to full charge.

I Made an Air Compressor Work Nicely

2008-10-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

I picked up an old air compressor that had seen better days from my brother a couple days ago. He'd gotten a larger permanent setup going and didn't need his old beat up compressor so I get the hand-me-down. Cool :)

When I asked what was wrong with it the list was along the lines of "something with the wires, it has a leak, and the gauge is broken." The pressure switch was also MIA, the belt has seen better days, and the whole thing looked rough as a pine cone. Time for a tear-down and cleaning.

I started by running it to figure out the problems since it did run if very poorly. The wiring was a lamp cord wrapped around the motor's terminals, the leak was from the compressor's leaf valve and from the copper feed to the tank, and the guage worked but was way off and sticks on 20PSI.

I took the head off the compressor, revealing a sludge in the piston chamber, as well as all over the two reed valves. Cleaned those up well with degreaser and a razor blade on the reeds, put it back together and it didn't leak there (and added about 10cc per cycle due pumped to not being full of sludge. I tried sealing the bad feed to the tank, but had to cut it shorter and put a new faring on the line, which solved that problem. I trimmed the frayed strands from the belt, oiled the motor, and attached the wires with proper connectors. With this done, I decided to check the crank case oil. This was a scary sight, as there was enough water in the oil to turn it a milky grey, and it was so old when I drained it most of it slowly plopped out for several minutes like grey snot. New oil in the case and it sounded happier while running. For now I'm testing pressure with a shrader valve and tire guage, unplugging the compressor around 100psi. After tightening the wobbly wheel up, I wire brushed the whole thing and painted it up. I also added a handle to make it easire to handle from my small blue pressure tank.

That "ka-pook-ka-pook-ka-pook-ka-pook" of an air compressor is a nice sound. Especially when it comes from something that was otherwise destined for the landfill. I know it might look a little rough now but by comparison to when I got it it looks great and runs fantastic. I expect this little thing will keep me in inflated tires and filled potato guns for as long as I like.

I Made a Really Big D20

2008-10-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

While showing a friend of mine some of the things I've made recently he asked me if I could make a big D20 (a 20 sided die used in some tabletop RPG games). We tossed around a few ideas for it and it sounded pretty ambitious since I didn't know the angles I'd need. I got a couple pieces of poplar 1x6, cut them into 20 equilateral triangles, put did some test cuts with a table saw until I got the right angle to put on the inside edge, and then had all the pieces done.

To attach them together used masking tape to put together 3 sections, the top, bottom, and middle belt, and used wood glue to hold it together. While the glue was still wet I put the three sections together, then balanced a weight on top to press the pieces together for a tighter seam.

The numbers were printed out, cut and taped in place. Then I used a square tip screwdriver to punch them into the wood and painted each number with model paint. After three coats of wood stain it was all done. You can see photos of the build on this Flickr set.

I made some LP baskets

2008-09-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

Since the dairy industry did me the diservice of changing the shape of milk crates to not hold LP records properly before I was born, I've never been able to just pick up a crate to keep my records in. The cheapo bins from Wal-Mart are fimsy and I wanted something better but didn't feel like messing with replacing the flimsybin enough to make something.

Then yesterday my stepmom mentioned wanting a bike basket after seeing my bike rack. I made one out of the same blue news stand mesh, 12" by 9". When I brought it inside and set it down by my record collection though I realized it was the right size to hold records. I had to make more of these to keep my LPs in.

The construction is pretty easy. Cut out a lopsided or even sided T with at least one dimension of the middle being 12". then fold, beat, and bang the sides up and into place, holding them down with zip ties for a little extra support. They turn out nice and hold about 50 records each. I made a full out Instructable here. It got featured on the Instructables homepage, kinda neat to have happen.

Since I commandeered my stepmom's basket (the initial one) I made a couple more so she'll still have one.

I Made a Nice Rack

2008-09-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

For about a month I've been riding my trusty, rusty, occasionally crusty bike around wherever I can. Gas is expensive and the exercise is good for my knee. Only problem is while on it I didn't have any way to carry things short of a backpack. While that works pretty well it does put extra load on me, which got me thinking about this nice rack a girl at FCCJ had. Not that kind of rack. Her bicycle had pannier cages. Moving on.

I went looking around and found the pannier style racks her bike had were too too big for what I usually need, and since I take great pride in the lacking looks, but smooth and easy ride of the bike, I decided to see what I could scrounge up. A little dumpster diving here, a little salvaging of some steel stock from my part of dad's materials junk pile and a handful of various mismatched nuts, hose clamps, and bolts from the garage and I had all I needed to make a bike rack.

The construction is pretty simple once you free your materials form their donor sources. I used the vice to bang the upright arms, U base, rack deck, and frame support (my terms) into the shapes I needed, drilled holes in the proper places (all eye-ball, not a measured inch on the whole thing), then bolted and clamped it all together. I tell myself the totally mis-matched fasteners are there as a means of keeping it from being stolen since you'd need the better part of a tool set to get the whole thing off of there. I had to cut a small chunk out of the front left and right since standing upright could let you bump into those parts, but this didn't impact carry capacity.

I'm very pleased with it and I'll probably give it a decent wire-brushing and a lick of paint when I get a chance. That or I might just leave it as-is for now.

Update 1:
I've gone ahead and painted the rack, it looks much nicer now and I've also made a pretty detailed set of instructions for it over at Instructables.com

I made a box

2008-09-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

Simple simple simple. I salvaged some 1x4 plywood planks that were broken from around my work, cut the broken ends off and cut the four odd lengths into as many 1' lengths as I could get. I put together four of them together as a frame, then screwed the extra ones onto the bottom, cutting the last one thin enough to not hang off the edge.

To finish it I went with a little rasping and sanding to smooth the edges and mask slightly unsquare edges and used a propane torch to add some age to the box, burn off the little flaky bits, and seal the wood a little. It's also a decent faux-aging since it already looks like something they don't make like that anymore. I dunno what I'm planning to do with the bugger. Any ideas? It's really strong, I guess it would make a good soapbox to speak from.

I made another ray gun (and a new term)

2008-09-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

A couple of friends of mine are going to an anime convention in Atlanta this weekend, and were wanting to do some steampunkish cosplay. They were looking to have some props and pieces for their costumes, so I obliged and made up a new ray gun.

The construction is pretty obvious, I pretty much just took a look in my junk bin and pulled out anything with a neat coil or old looking electromechanical component. I wound up soldering a copper pipe to the shaft of a vacuum motor core. Then, using pipe clamps I mounted that to a pull saw handle. I attached the other bits with super-glue, some more soldering, hot glue, and adding magnet wire where it looked necessary and what you see below is what I wound up with.

It's pretty hefty since it's got so much steel and copper to it. I was originally going for steampunk, but since I didn't have much copper or brass on hand, but did have plenty of coils and simple but chunky electronics on hand I went with that and I've decided to further splinter the "old looking things that look like more modern things made with old technology" movement and dub this a Teslapunk death ray. It's not quite Buck Rogers looking enough to my eye to group it with that time, and the round motor core on top kinda looks reminicent of a revolver. My original plan was to have there be a button and battery to trigger the solenoid so there'd be some motion to it, but since they were headed out I decided to put further additions off for the moment. Maybe I'll add that and some sound effects when they get back.

I made something to clean rust

2008-09-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

I was reading a post on makezine.com about electrolytic rust removal. The setup described called for rebar, washing soda, a battery charger, a bucket, wire nuts, wire, and several other parts. Looking over the whole thing though it seemed like the whole setup just needed the charger (or any low voltage, decent amperage power source), an electrolytic solution, the metal to be cleaned, and an anode which could be any conductive metal. I wanted to test it out as cheaply as possible to see how effective it could be without making a big to-do about setting it up.

My materials were as follows:
Salt (1/4 cup or I just poured til I felt jazzy)
Water (the wet kind, not the solid kind)
Baling wire (cheap, metal, and flexible)
6-12v charger (anything more than 10 amps is serious overkill and won't work any better)
Bucket (which you should always has)

Setup is pretty simple. Fill the bucket with water, mix the salt in well, bend a piece of baling wire so it sits in the water down to the bottom of the bucket in a couple places. Next attach the + (red) charger cable to the baling wire and the -(Black) cable to the piece you want cleaned. Set the peice in the water (fully submerged is preferable) and plug in/turn on your charger. You should start seeing bubbles within 30 seconds on both the submerged wire and piece. My scissors bubbled more on the side with clamp because the joint in the middle doesn't connect them terribly well I guess.

After leaving the whole setup in a well ventilated place for about an hour for smaller things, more for larger, you should be able to take a wire brush to clean off any remaining rust, then redipping any parts that weren't under the water before. You can leave it in longer, but I was happy with the results I got with about 1:30. Taking a wire wheel, wire brush, or steel wool to clean the whole thing and then keeping it either clearcoated or covered in light oil will prevent further corrosion. Shabam!, from rusted solid to ready for re-sharpening in an hour and a half. I need to hit up a flea market and get some rusty but awesome old tools to do next.

I'll Make an SOS to The World

2008-09-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

I made a message in a bottle to send out to whoever might find it. I used some Faux aged paper I made a while ago by dipping heavy stock paper in coffee and wrote out a letter on it. I'll put it in a wine bottle, seal the end with wax and a cork, and chunk it out to sea. Here's to hoping someone finds it and emails me back since I left a finder's log with my email address on it.

I also went ahead and printed out the lyrics to "Message in a bottle" by The Police to toss out in a bottle as well. I figured it would be a funny thing to find in a message in a bottle. I'll update with pictures of tossing the bottles as well as if anyone replies to them. Who knows where they might wind up?

I Made Steampunk Goggles (Just like everyone else!)

2008-09-11T19:38:00.000-07:00

For some time now I've been meaning to get or make a set of steampunk goggles. While they are a staple of the steampunk scene and one can't be expected to properly pilot an aerodrome or keep a boiler properly tuned without a set. I didn't want to make some that were overly simple or shell out the money for a set of brazing goggles. I also wanted to make them from fairly common materials so that others could build on mine if they like. Instructables.org has several 'ibles on how to make various sets of goggles, but when I saw this one I knew I could make it work for what I wanted.

Instead of using a baseball I went with a softball. I didn't really want to spray paint Gatorade lids for eye pieces so I walked around the hardware section of [Big-Blue-Box-Store] and found some brass-plated door bumpers that looked just right for the task. I also decided that elastic would make for an easier headband than rings and painted denim.

The whole process is pretty simple. You cut the stitching off of your softball until you've got one of the peanut shaped leather pieces, then cut that in the middle. These will be your left and right sides. Color them black or dark brown (I used a big black permanent marker, paint works too). You cut a reticle-like shape just smaller in diameter than your eye cups (door bumpers) and super-glue the tabs to the inside of the eye cups. After that you can super glue or hot glue round clear plastic (plexiglass or that impenetrable packaging plastic works well) into place as the lenses. Sew the middle together slightly above center, then sew the elastic band on the ends.

You're now one step closer to a becoming a proper ornithopter test pilot. Just remember that goggles alone do not steampunk make. One must come up with other creative re-imaginings of the contrivances of the contemporary with the contraptioning of days long gone.

These goggles were actually the second set I've had a hand in, with the first being for a friend, I just made these from the leftovers and extra bumpers. His look almost exactly like mine, except I hot glued my lenses in place.

I made a solar light for the dock

2008-09-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

Since my dad had a big extension put on our dock, he's worried that someone might come around at night and hit the end of it. We didn't want anything too big or wired out there, just something to mark the end of the dock at night. As I was cleaning up around the dock after tropical storm Fay came through and flooded out the back yard, I noticed that it had broken and washed up some of the solar walkway lights near the waterline.

After a thorough cleaning and repair to a broken trace on the charging circuit, I managed to get one of these lights working again, but the housing for it was too cracked and dryrotted to be of any good, which is OK since those things always looked like butt anyway. I found a candle holder that had stained glass on it and it happened to fit the solar light just right, so I hot glued it in place after charging the batteries and went looking for parts for a base to hold the new light fixture up.

The storm also blew and washed in plenty of other good flotsam as well, including some barnacle covered but still sound 2x6 boards. I sent them through the saw and nailed them together, then used some salvaged drywall screws to hold down the light. After this I took it down to the dock and screwed it in place while hanging loosely onto the end pole of the dock. With the barnacle spots it looks pretty cool, the whole thing didn't cost one red cent, and we don't have to worry about errant boaters denting the dock with misdirected dinghies.

I made up a story

2008-08-31T08:37:00.001-07:00

This is pretty much a filler post, but something of an insight to how I process things in my head as I make them.

I was bored at work yesterday and saw a half-erased squiggle on the white board. I noticed the squiggles looked like a set of eyes and a large tongue, so I drew out what I saw more clearly, giving them more definition with the tongue crease and the outlines of the eyes. Then I needed to give the face a head. The eyes were too long to make a decent head, so I left them as stalks above the head. I didn't want to draw a body since I was just doodleing so I added arthopod legs to the sides of the head. It looked like a crab with no claws now.

I wanted to leave the crab there for all my coworkers to see on Monday, but the crab needed a reason to be there, so I decided that he must be a server crab since I work at a datacenter (where a lot companies run their servers from, it's kinda where the internet lives) so I labeled him as such. I then wondered what it is that a server crab might do. Since he didn't look like he could manage much aside from licking things it seemed obvious that server crabs must be quite adept at licking server. This presents a problem though, since valuable electronics that have to run all the time and saliva all over said electronics wouldn't go well together.

I decided that the server crab was a wanted man (a wanted crab?). I added a quote and a wanted sign above his head, then came up with the notice below. I also figured that if the server crab was on a wanted poster, he must have facial hair befitting a fugitive, so he got a pencil moustache. Then with the addition of a border to the poster and a nail to hold it in place the poster was more or less done.

I've added a better description today "Wanted in connnection with saliva-related hardware failures in datacenters world-wide. Should be approached with caution and a bowl of melted butter." and added $10,000 below that.

I made a shelf out of wine bottles

2008-08-14T20:46:00.000-07:00

On Instructables, I found a project someone had made where they used turn buckles and wine bottles to make shelves. The other day I saw someone on Craigslist giving away a case of empty wine bottles. Can you guess where those two ideas met up?

I got the bottles, and they turned out to be from all manner of vineyards. There turned out to be enough matching bottles for one shelf, and when I snagged a couple extra bottles from the house I had enough for two shelves. I got the cheapest non-plywood plank wood I could get, which is an odd finger jointed composite wood which looks like it was made from all the scraps with knots in it. For half the price of pieces made the same way with fewer knots and 1/4 to 1/8 the price of solid planks I figured I'd give it a go. I matched the bottles and cleaned off the labels first. I think some labels had a water soluble glue, while others a different glue since some came off easily with hot water and for others I needed to use gas to get the adhesive off the bottle. Then I got to work on the wood.

After ripping the 16" planks to 8" I added recesses for the tip of each bottle to sit into the shelf above it. I also put in two holes for the eye bolts to go trough just off center on each side of each plank. After test fitting it all, I took it apart, cut some small plywood feet to keep the bottom nut and bolt from touching the floor, screwed them in place, sanded, and stained all the wood.

Also along the way I managed to break one of the bottles I needed, so I had to go get more wine to finish the project. It turns out Barefoot wine is pretty good. It also turns out that working with tools while tipsy on a half bottle of wine is pretty fun. Good thing I had other bottles around to put the rest in, I wasn't feeling like working with tools while glassy-eyed.

Bada-bing, bada-boom and I have wine-bottle shelves. I might still add a third bottle height to it, but I need to get four more matching bottles. If you plan to do this yourself, go with more solid wood since I think the wood I used being under the stress this puts it in may wind up weakening the glue joints over time. We'll see how that goes. You can also forgoe the turn buckles and just use some small chain since I just wound up using the eye bolts to tighten the whole shebang down anyway. Also try to make sure that your bottles come from the same brand and type since very small differences in the bottle height can wind up as less-than-tightly held bottles in the shelves. Just use it as an excuse to buy a case of wine I guess. Just remember not to drink the case before making the shelves. Recruit friends if need be.

There are plenty of photos over on flickr of the construction. I'll add some of them here later, after I figure out where the heck to put this shelf....

I made a cooler usable again

2008-08-07T07:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I'm scooting around on the ugly scootling I come across things I can't pass up. A few days ago I found a large dirty, and broken Igloo cooler. My dad has a couple of these and they're great for long trips or parties. While I can use his when I need one, as I passed this one waiting for garbage pickup I decided I could use one for myself. It's probably one of the largest coolers Igloo makes, and with the lid trying to fall off, I loaded it onto the passenger seat, threw and arm over it and putted unsteadily back to the house, gathering more than a couple funny looks for having a cooler as long as the scooter itself with me.

Once I got it back to the house I cleaned it up some. Dried fish goo and dirt were caked inside and out so I scoured it with Comet after taking all the hardware off. Next was to find a way to fix the broken parts on it.

When I looked on Igloo's website they wanted 15 dollars for a "cooler repair kit". This includes a set of plastic hinges, clasps for the front, and some other odds and ends. The problem with these are the same as why this cooler was in the trash. They break reliably within a year or two since the hinging is just flexing plastic. I decided to use some chrome steel hinges for 99c a pack from the local hardware store. There was also the problem of keeping it closed but I decided to simply forgoe the clasps since the lid is heavy enough to hold itself shut mostly. The handle areas were cracked, and looked like they might not hold up too well under weight, so I used some 2 part epoxy and JB Weld (JB Quik actually) to reinforce those areas and to keep water out of the foam inside. I may have sealed in some sugar ants as well. Since the drain cap was MIA I went looking for a plug for the hole. A cork from a bottle of Hana Sake did the trick nicely. The last problem was the strap inside that keeps the lid from flopping back. That was an easy fix. Cut off the broken part and put a new hole in it. Good as new.

There were a couple things that I tried that didn't work like I wanted. I tried to use a window clasp where the normal clasp was, but the plastic is soft enough that a good pull would pop it open. I also tried to replace the strap inside with a piece of bike inner tube, but the rubber was too stretchy and didn't work.

After that, I stenciled on my name the lid since my dad's cooler is so similar to mine. Wouldn't want him to accidently lay claim to it. ;) I'm gonna take it out today with some friends to a dirt bike track and give it a good test.

Update 1:

Took the cooler out, it works as expected, except the handles were both on the virge of coming off the whole time. I replaced the screws with some bolts going clean through to the inside. It's not the prettiest solution, but I'd rather not have a heavy cooler fall on my toe again....

I made a banner

2008-07-19T06:59:00.001-07:00

I decided to try and make a nice looking banner for my band Anderdown. We have a logo I'm pretty sure we're sticking with, but it was too small and I'm not the best at replicating something I've already drawn so I dug up my old opaque projector a largeish ceramic bowl.

First I used the bowl to make a circle on a bamboo place mat the size I wanted, then I used the projector to give me a good image I could trace onto the mat. After that I filled it in and placed the band name across the side with some stencils. There is still a large empty space across the bottom, which I'm still trying to decide on what to fill with. I think it came out looking pretty good myself.

I might remake it with Anderdown on one line so there's no confusion over it being one word or two, I just liked the way it lays out when it's two woods.

Update:
I made another banner that has "ANDERDOWN" written in a single word rather than two. The mat I used this time is a little larger. I'll figure out what to do with that space in a bit.

I made a toy into a guitar pedal

2008-07-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

I went to Cracker Barrel a few days ago and among the balsa wood airplanes and lawn ornaments, I came across a red toy megaphone that has switches to change your voice when you talk into it. High and low pitch shift and "alien voice" which makes it monotone and warbley. It made for some pretty interesting sounds, so I got it and decided to see what could be done with it. I stayed pretty tame with it, just adding an input and output jack, a power switch so you don't have to hold it on, and a speaker cutoff switch. The sampling is so slow that anything that goes through it is bitchrushed pretty well. I might put it into a pedal like thing or I might leave it as is. WHO KNOWS!!?!?!

Update 1:

I decided to make the guitar pedal style case for it. I looked up the size of a normal pedal, roughly went with that. A couple hours and a couple dozen dremel cut-off wheels later I'd taken the lid of an old server case that had a nice baked on paint and turned it into a rough pedal case. It actually makes for rather nice project cases, and I'll probably make a post on how to make them some time. If you have old computer cases or any thin, flat sheet metal around it's very easy. Anyway, there's a photo of it as it stands right now on the right.

Being as I still need a proper stomp switch to cut it on and off I'll have to get back to finishing it later, but for now you get the idea. I'll probably get a DPDT switch if I can and see if it can be wired to either feed the signal through the pedal or around it since the circuit doesn't do that on it's own.

I made a mystery (in 2002)

2008-07-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

Some time in 2002 I took apart a dead IBM model 5051 computer which had an equally dead 10MB hard drive in it. The computer went to the dump, but the hard drive was too unique to toss. There had been some bad head crashing, to the point that one of the read heads had been smashed off and was bouncing around inside the drive when I took it apart. I wasn't sure what to do with it; it was of not use in a computer since it was too broke too fix, but it did have a pretty good size space inside it once I'd removed the brassy platters.

I came about the idea that I should use it to store some information I could look back on after reading through old journals I wrote in 3rd grade, and eventually decided on writing a letter to myself, which I would then store in the hard drive as a time capsule. I wanted to try keeping it sealed for as long as possible to make sure I had time to forget what I'd written, originally wanting to keep it closed for 25 years, but I wanted to be able to crack it open before I was terribly old as well, so I weaned back the time to 10 years instead. Since screwing it back together with it's new "data" stored in an aluminum casing, I set it in a closet and tried to forget about it. I still pull it down every once in a while while I'm cleaning and resist the urge to crack it open. I originally taped a piece of paper with "2012" on it to the top, but eventually decided it would be better to replace that with "2012" etched into the metal of the case, so it couldn't be lost.

I still remember feeling somewhat guilty for not putting the exact date I closed it up on there, knowing that I would forget when that was, but I also remember doing that so I would be able to open it any time in 2012 I wished. I might carry it with me to whatever new year's party I do that year. All I can remember of what's written on it is a list of the friends I had at the time, but I know there's more than that. So that's about it, it's a mystery I've set my self up for. Maybe when the time comes I'll write some reflections on the first letter and make up another letter to myself for 2022. I'd like to make it a tradition if I can. It's always good to keep some mystery in your life, even if it's just an old hard drive in your closet.

I made some small things (Part II)

2008-07-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

There isn't a whole lot to this one folks, but a couple months ago I rode out to the beach, and while looking for things to build my shade out of, I also happened upon two coconuts that had washed onto the beach. I took off the husk and when I got home, cut it open, emptied it, and glued it to a slice of bamboo I also found on the beach and made a cup. It looks pretty neat, but the inside smells a little odd so I don't plan to use it to hold my margaritas any time soon. Ohh well, might have to make one from a fresh coconut some time.

I also was doing some cleaning over the past couple days, and decided to make something out of the junk I have around. The first thing I made was originally meant as a homemade leslie speaker, but I couldn't get it to turn at a usable speed, so Daniel and I turned it into a spinning, shaking, whirring, mesmerizing light ring of death. It's made of an aluminum plate with a fan motor (and mangled fan blade), controlled by a dimmer switch. The effect was very entertaining and turning the speed up made the whole thing shake like a Chihuahua on a vibrating motel bed.

The last thing I made is a spot light. It's pretty simple, just a large switch, 3 wires, a battery, a light, and a few blobs of hot glue. It works well and shines a ton of light, so I'll be keeping it around and keeping an eye out on a good enclosure to put it all in.

I made some cave paintings

2008-06-30T22:44:00.000-07:00

Well, perhaps they aren't quite cave paintings, but a few weeks ago I was riding around on my scooter and noticed some graffiti tagged on a small bridge near my house. Ever since I was a little kid this bridge has had stupid things painted on and under it from white supremacist stuff to the usual crude pictures of wangs and cuss words a 12 year old who raided his dad's garage for a can of Krylon might get the urge to paint. It's always gotten on my nerves when I'd go by under the bridge and see all of that, and when I saw some of this on the top side of the bridge going by it sparked my interest in cleaning it all up some.

I started out just spraying white over the tag on the top of the bridge, but decided to use my day off to go ahead and paint over the junk under as well with some old paint I got free on craigslist. I loaded up the scooter and got to work white washing over phrases such as "yo daddy suck ass" and as I did so with a few different colors paredolia kicked in and I decided to make the blobbed over shapes in the paint into something (hopefully) more attractive.

I started out with one large splotch of blue that looked something like a big blue bird. I added detail to the head and came back to add the beak and whites of the eyes when I would switch paints. I also added a big tree next to it once I painted over something vertical next to it with brown.

There were seveal other things I made into paintings, including a night skyline that I'm happy with the results and detail of considering I was teetering on rocks the whole time, was using a 2" brush, and was only working with four colors. Even with all this though there were still many areas as you can see where all I did was basically paint over whatever offending remark was there. I did leave one original bit of paint that simply said "Hello"; under it I pained "HI" with a smiley face.

The cool thing is now for the first time I have something more interesting to look at any time I ride under the bridge and even though it's still graffiti I think it's a huge step up from what was previously under there. Here's to hoping it'll either be left alone or improved upon and not just mindlessly tagged over. The real question with all of this is does all this painting make me an arteest yet?

I made a strange looking guitar

2008-06-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

This is a project I've been messing with on and off for a long time now. Since I've known my friend Daniel I've been learning about guitars, the forms they've taken, and musical things in general. One thing I've often tried to do is imagine strange configurations or ways of modifying guitars to make them elicit a previously unknown sound, this proves to be very difficult since there have been close to 80 years of people doing strange things to guitars to amplify them. It seemed like every time I would think up or imagine some combination of parts to make a guitar do something none had before Daniel knew of some obscure instrument that does just such a thing or my idea had been tried and wasn't of any real use.

During one of my idea-making moments though, playing with one of his guitars while it was partially disassembled, I came up with an idea he hadn't heard of before. The idea was to take a Stratocaster-style guitar, and move the middle pickup to the outside of the guitar, sitting over top the neck pickup. I figured it might make for a clean sound like a single-coil pickup, but also be useful in clearing up the "hum" that humbuckers "buck", or cancel out.

Between the two of us, we got a Squire Bullet from a pawn shop, a simple, no frills strat and set about figuring out how to turn it into something neither of us had ever heard of. We eventually came up with the idea that as long as we're modifying the guitar and since we'd have to route room in the body for switches to set phasing, turn on/off pickups, and run pickups in series or parellel we might as well make a spot to move the bridge pickup and modify the bridge to have an extra run of strings below the bridge with a pickup under it. This would allow for the guitar to directly pick up playing on this short and high pitched length of strings. To the left is what a similar Bullet looks like, and what the Hoverbucker started out like.

I quickly dumpster dived some white sheet plastic (shower wall panel) and made blank copies of the Bullet's original pick guard. A month or two later I cut and shaped an old aluminum "out of order" sign into a replacement bridge and made a mount for the exposed pickup from some scrap plexi-glass and wood left over from making the lightbox. There won't be much of an ability to intonate the bridge without filing it down, but we'll cross that bridge when it comes (holy-crap-pun-lol). Since I'm not familiar with the specifics of setting intonation (I can scarcely tune a guitar) I'll leave that to Daniel to advise on. I also removed the bridge saddles from the stock tail piece so it can be used for a tail piece at the bottom of the guitar.

After that, I posted pictures and the idea on the Harmony Central Forums, asking anyone there for their input and ideas, as well as finding a wiring diagram for a similar setup that allowed for a lot of choice with regard to the switching setup. From here the project sat untouched for several more months while other things in life needed more attention such as school and my nephew's guitar. It went in a bag next to my hand made longbow that needs to be tuned and set. Now that I've had some time to work on it some more and I already had need of a router thanks to the cigar box guitars I've worked on over the last week I figured it would be a good time to make the body modifications that the hoverbucker guitar needed. I got to try my hand for the first time with both a table and hand-held router and they both were nice to use thanks to Mr. John's assistance explaining their proper use.

As a side note, this blog is serving as a good motivator for me to finish projects that have otherwise sat half-done for a while. It's nice having somewhere to show off the stuff I do with the added bonus that someone might actually care enough to read about it. What ever will I do for updates once I run out of half-finished projects to finish for a quick post's worth of material? I might have to go back to building things from start to finish. :O

Anyway, I then went about cutting up another of the pick guard blanks into a cover for the bridge pickup, I just cut it into a rectangle, rounded the corners, and smoothed it with a file. I then drilled some holes for the switches to mount into, widened the hole for the kill switch from the original volume knob hole, and for the screws in the bridge cover. I put it all together and dummied up everything in place. I have to wait until tommorow to get a DPDT switch to replace the SPDT switch I have in place for the phase switch right now, but you can get an idea of how it will all look now. I'm still not sure how it will work or if it will unlock some strange, never before heard sounds, but it certainly looks interesting so far and even if it's just a strat with an extra weird pickup it'll certainly be a unique instrument.

(Update 1)
I finished the guitar, and it does some interesting things. After showing it off on this Harmony Central thread it seems to be getting a good recepion. Here's a couple videos of Daniel playing it. He seems pretty stoked about it too.

As usual, there are more photos on my Flickr page.

I Made a(nother) Cigar Box Guitar

2008-06-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

About a year or so ago I read in Make magazine about how to make a guitar from basically a stick, some bolts, string, and a cigar box. I made one and it was a functional 3 string guitar, but it left a lot to be desired. It wouldn't hold tune, had no frets or fret markings, and didn't play very well for a number of other reasons. It did show me how easy making a stringed instrument can be though, and taught me a lot about the fundamentals of guitars. Pictured here is the old cigar box guitar.

Fast forward to today and I've since rebuilt one guitar from the wood up, rewired a couple, and generally learned more about them, and when I saw some nice cigar boxes for 50c a piece the other day I decided it was time to try my hand at making a better one. I got some parts first, with the strings and tuning machines being the only things I had to get that were purpose-made for a guitar. The rest of the materials were a couple thin pieces of red oak (quickly becoming a favorite wood of mine), a length of poplar, some dollar-store stainless shish kabob skewers, and some other odds and ends.

I decided that I wanted this guitar to be made to a full scale, so I copied the bridge length and fret pattern off my strat-o-monster (another top secret project everyone I know knows about). I also wanted to have the fretboard above the body of the guitar as most normal guitars have, so I did a lot of eye-balling and a little measuring and wound up with a layout that uses a piece of red oak as a shim and another as the fretboard. I decided the neck would be much too thick for anyone short of an orangutan to play with those two and the poplar neck together, and the tuning machines needed the headstock area to be thinner, so I went to work rasping down the needed areas.

Rasping always seems like it won't be too bad before I start. "I'm just taking off 1cm of wood, it's not too bad." an hour and a half later I'd roughed out the shape of the neck and ensured my Popeye-like forearms won't be going anywhere soon. I glued most of the neck together and smoothed all the pieces together with my trusty surform rasp. I also cut a pair of notches for the neck to stick through the body with. With the neck glued together, it slides into the box and begins to look like a guitar. The neck is super-wide. It'll mostly be used for playing slide though, so no worries.

I had to drill out new string holes in the tuning machines since the stock ones sat very low on the pegs. I picked up the cheapest set of tuning machines I could find, which wound up being for a classical guitar. I just made sure to drill the holes perpendicular to the stock ones to keep from weakening the pegs. The ornate brass style of them matches the look of the box well though.

A few ideas I was entertaining but decided against: (1)Making it 3 string. There was too much fretboard and I had the tuning machines already. (2)Adding frets. That was the original purpose of the skewers and superglue, but since the neck is so wide and I got too impatient to make the notches in the fretboard I justify pushing on by telling myself this is something like an old blues guitar and the wide neck won't hurt playing slide.

Update 1:
I tried to make do with a set of metal plates I had for the tail piece, but it didn't drop the strings low enough for them to hold over the bridge, so I'll have to use some L brackets and shape a curve down the tail end to let the strings drop some. It'll look better like that anyway. I cut the bottoms out of both boxes and glued them together for more of an air chamber. I also filed out some groves for the nut and bridge bolts to sit in, glued the neck, tail piece, and top box lid together. I'll leave the bottom lid unglued until I figure out how I want to mount a pickup.

Update 2:
I got the guitar playable yesterday, adding the stop piece and stringing it. I filed down the tail end to let the strings get some fall, then made a stop piece from galvanized steel and strung the guitar. It still needs to be sanded, stained, and clear coated on the body, but it's playable and sounds pretty nice. The stacked boxes give it more volume than just one, and it works pretty well for slide. A friend who plays guitar says that it has a similar sound to a 12 string when played with slide. It also has a weird sympathetic effect coming from the bridge over the tail, which is interesting and not loud enough to be more than just noticeable. Though the neck doesn't have a truss rod it hasn't taken very much bow either, which was something I was concerned with initially.

Update 3:
I've finished sanding and clear coating the CBG, and I've also added bamboo frets. I also added a piezo pickup and jack so the guitar can be amplified. The frets could still use some fine tuning since there are a few places where a couple frets are short enough to cause fret buzz, but the piezo comes through very clearly and the guitar sounds very nice. I'll fix the maligned frets when
I get a chance, but it's very playable as-is as evidenced by my buddy Daniel shows below.

There are more pictures of this guitar on Flickr.

Update 4: Make: blog has posted about my CBG, Thanks guys! I've also made another guitar. It's pretty much the same, but I cleaned up some of the rough edges and clear coated the boxes before putting it all together. I might make some more, who knows.

I Made a Laptop Bag

2008-06-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

For a long time now, I've had the luck of having a laptop, but the misfortune of having the battery shot to heck and I had to replace the screen on my Compaq laptop with an HP screen when it broke some time ago. It's also had a bad habit of dying for sometimes weeks at a time for some time now, and I finally decided to replace it with something I can get more reliability from since I had a little money saved up. I pinched my nose and went to the Apple store for a MacBook. Though I like being able to edit videos and audio with much more ease than on my Windows or Ubuntu machines, there's one physical problem with the MacBook. It's shiny. Too shiny. I'm not particularly gentle with my technology as my cell phone and old laptop would be quick to tell you if they could. I've been known to toss, drop, bite, and bury such things (sometimes deliberately).

I just spent 0ver 1000 dollars on the laptop I'm currently typing this on though, and I'd like to keep it in good shape as much as I can. One of the biggest hazard zones my old laptop faced on a regular basis was the inside of my backpack. With books, pens, clip boards, cables, tools, and who knows what else to bounce around with, I can see my shiny mac getting skinned up like a kid with new roller blades and a steep hill. I wanted a case for it, but didn't want anyting bulky or expensive, it also needed to be soft on the laptop. I've been wrapping it with a $3 towel from Big Lots for a few days, but it wasn't really ideal to wrap it like that into the foreseeable future.

Since the towel was already soft and large enough for holding the laptop though, I decided to take it from a loose toga to a custom tailored suit. Luckily, the towel was twice as wide as the laptop, which meant I could just fold it in half and it would hold the laptop without cutting the edges on the main edges. I folded it over and started to sew up the seam. I made sure to stitch the seams around the edge twice so I don't have to worry about it breaking, this also just made the whole thing look better since with one seam the edge of the towel was visible.

I sewed and I sewed and I cut the towel to shape and I sewed for about an hour and a half, and I had a nice fitting bag, but no way to close it. I didn't want to use buttons since the terrycloth would probably stretch over time so I cut some clips loose from an old worn out messenger bag I don't use and added some straps to them from a tie down strap I found on the side of the road. I melted the ends of the straps together so they won't fray and sewed those onto the bag. That was about all there was to it.

The finished bag should hold up well and when I showed it off to some friends they were pretty impressed. I might make another some time if the need arises out of a more sturdy towel, and If I do I'll be sure to use the sewing machine I didn't know was in the house until I was almost done.

I made a canoe float

2008-06-10T17:01:00.001-07:00

A guy that works with my dad got hold of an old and very porous canoe a couple weeks ago. It looked like someone had dropped it off the back of a truck, which cracked, bent, and broke large holes all in the hull. The problem looked to have been made worse by someone who tried to fix the holes with a grinder rather than some sand paper. Some of the gaps in the fiberglass were as long as someone's arm and an inch or so wide, some were just big enough to see daylight through, and one was almost large enough to fit my head through. The tail end was tenuously held connected to the rest of the canoe with the aluminum along the top edge and hope. Unfortunately I lost the "before" pictures of the canoe, but as you can see below, the holes in the vessel would have ensured it went down in the water much faster than it went forward if you tried to take it out for a leisurely ride. The middle bracing support and the front seat were also missing in action, so replacements for those would have to be fashioned as well.

My dad, I, and his coworker started by covering the large holes with a slick black plastic that the fiberglass wouldn't stick to and the smaller ones with packing tape. We then cut some strips of fiberglass to size and mixed up some resin. It was a hot day, and fiberglass resin sets up fast when it's hot, so we had to work fast. We added to coats to the large holes on the outside, one coat on the small holes and inside, and generally coated anywhere that looked to be of questionable strength with more resin, which was most of the boat.

After all that had set up and hardened, we worked on the missing pieces, the middle beam and the front seat. we cut both out of wood, coating the middle beam in resin and fiberglassing the bottom of the seat to the boat. the whole thing looked almost seaworthy now.

I had to head to work before they were finished, but when I came back the next day, the canoe had been painted and apparently taken out. They said it worked as well as a new one. You wouldn't think that something that looked as much like a big piece of trash could be recovered like that so quickly. Very cool stuff

I made a chair

2008-05-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

Some time last year I was having a bad day, and usually when that happens and there isn't much to be done about it I try to do something to occupy my time and my hands. I'd just gotten a pull-stroke hand saw and decided to try it out in the back yard. I started by cutting down several saplings toward the back of the yard, not sure what I was going to do with them. As I built up a nice pile of straight-ish sapling trunks, I decided to try making a chair out of them. I cut them to length, make the front, then the back, then joined those, all with wood screws. Some of the wood was very soft, so as that wood split a lot, but it still held up fairly well. I split some sections of the wood down the middle and used those as the seat and added some diagonal pieces to make the whole thing more stable. It's not as large or comfortable as a normal chair, but that wasn't really the point of it anyway. I had to add some zip ties to hold together one part in the back that split when I was using the chair as a stool to stand on, but other than that it's dried out and held up pretty well. I'll probably make a better one some time with pre-drilled holes and dried wood. for now, this one lives in my dad's gazebo. My grandma always prefered to do something productive when she was mad, and I'm glad to say I think I picked up that trait from her.

I made an arcade game cabinet

2008-05-25T08:15:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I got into old arcade video games. They represented a time that I wasn't a part of which seemed to have it's own story with dimly lit caves full of kids and teenagers who were free to roam around and try their hand at besting rows of machines that would entertain and cast a cool light over their faces until the quarters were gone and their three initials had been etched into the game's record of heroes. It seemed (and still seems) a shame to me that these places of social video games are slowly fading away, and I wanted to have a part of that time. I looked into it and found that much like home video game systems like the NES, Sega Genesis, and Atari have been translated into programs that emulated their games for modern computers, arcade games have much the same thing going for them with a program called MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). I was able to not only play something similar to those original arcade games, but actually play the originals, their code and idiosyncrasies pulled straight from their original game boards and loaded for me to play on my PC, even down to having to press a button to "feed" the game a quarter.

For a while this was very interesting and fun, but it still wasn't the full experience of standing in front of a real arcade machine and mashing buttons and joysticks. I looked into MAME's community more and found that there were already many other people, maybe hundreds, who had the same want for a full arcade machine in their home that I did, and thanks to the Internet, they had gotten together to share stories of how they made it happen and what they did along the way. Some people had gotten old arcade games and fitted a computer to the original screen and joysticks; others had started from scratch and build their cabinets, ordered brand new controls to use in their machines. Some had used old keyboards and PC joysticks with a rat's nest of wires connecting everything while others had come up with or used very professional looking, very clean machines that were custom designed for their purpose. Many people had created huge four player behemoths that have every controller from every arcade game one could imagine while still others had created coffee table sized machines that were best suited to earlier, more simple games. I was hooked on the idea of having my own.

I poured over every instruction page, build log, and relevant site I could find, trying to figure out the best way for to go about bringing this idea to life. I slowly collected parts that I thought would be useful and saved my pennies for either buying a gutted/dead game or buying the materials to build my own. I happened upon a dealer at the local flea market who sells video games and used to work with arcade games. He had a few boxes of old controls which I bought, along with a marquee panel for Robotron 2084. Most of these had 20 years worth of grime, grunge, and cigarette burns from having spent as much time in arcade games and parts bins. I managed to salvage and clean enough controls to get a full set of control for 2 players. I still didn't have a cabinet to put them in though.

After a false start with someone on eBay selling me a cabinet for cheap, but refusing to ship it, I decided it would be best to build my own rather than wait to happen upon one locally. I decided to go with a design called LuSiD's Arcade Flashback. It's large, and gave plenty of room for the needed parts, as well as being fairly simple to construct. A friend of my dad who's a fantastic carpenter helped me construct the cabinet out of Melamine backed MDF. It's a type of particle board often used on counter tops, and was what many people used for their cabinets since it's got a nice smooth surface. The problem was that it's hard to work with. You have to pre-drill all holes and glue all screws and seams together or you risk the materials breaking apart. It also weighs a ton and has nice sharp edges, so any time it would slip it would cut me. With the help of my dad's friend these concerns were minimized and in the end the cabinet went together as planned, with a few additions such as a piano hinge on the control panel to make adding controls easier down the line and a slot for the marquee to slide into so that I could easily swap it later if I wanted to. I had construction photos for the cabinet, but they may be lost to the digital sands of time.

Now that I had all the major parts ready, I began putting things together. I cut a clear plexi cover for the control panel and mounted the controls, wiring only one side since I still wasn't sure how I was going to set up the second set. Then I scrapped together a computer from my parts bin and set the huge 19" monitor an uncle had given me in place only to find out the case was too large for my cabinet. I removed the plastic case over the screen and that made the clearance just right.

Once I got the cabinet up and running in a basic sense it sat unfinished for some time until I got the urge to work on it more. This time I took it apart, painted everything one cold morning, and then rewired the controls, this time hacking up a USB game pad to allow me to wire all the controls, though I left a few of the P2 buttons unfinished. I also added a large Donkey Kong decal to the side so I would have some side art rather than a blank black cabinet. For a marquee light I used whatever I had most available. At one time that was a nice florescent lamp, which was later repurposed, giving way to duct tape and a desk lamp, which I didn't like the idea of after a short while. I replaced that with a florescent tube powered by the driver circuit from a CFL bulb. This idea later became the idea I also used in the lightbox a friend and I made.

That was how the arcade cabinet usually went for a couple years. I'd work on it once in a while, slowly scrapping together better pieces and a better computer, but it would generally stay in some state of disrepair and general untidiness. At one point another uncle of mine, knowing I was working on this, brought me a very beat up, damaged, and barely working N.A.R.C. cabinet, from which I finally got a coin door to put in the cabinet as well as some other working parts. I'd snag a part from the computer to feed another project or the controls would snag a loose wire while playing and kill one or more buttons. Eventually I got tired of such things though and decided to fully finish it. I wired all the controls properly and cleaned up the rats nest that had developed beneath the control panel, made a bezel to go around the screen and shroud the less than clean paint job behind it, and set up MAME with a pack of several thousand games and made sure the settings allowed you to control as much of the system as possible with the arcade controls.

Everyone who saw or played with the cabinet liked it (especially when it was working properly), but since I'd had it a couple years now and I'd long since appeased my bug to have a full-sized arcade machine I started thinking about how much I needed the space the cabinet took more than I needed the cabinet. I also felt somewhat bad for having it and using it as little as I did since the time I first got it going.

I posted the machine on CraigsList, hoping to pass it along to someone who would get more use and fun out of it, and after letting it sit for about a month, a kid about the same age I was when I started looking into MAME offered me more than I'd ever put into the cabinet (not counting labor time of course). I was happy to see it move on to someone who would get some fun out of it, and it seemed like it was passing full circle since before the kid (I say kid, he wasn't more than 5 years younger than me) and his dad left, I heard them already talking about how big it was and trying to figure out how to find somewhere to put it; a discussion my dad and I had when he first saw how large the empty cabinet really was.

It was really an enjoyable project, and I really learned a lot about wood working, electronics, soldering, how things like video games were made in the past, and how computer interfacing could be done. I might get a taste to make a newer machine some day, but it would definitely be much smaller (something that could fit on a counter top) and likely be made of normal plywood. If anyone reading this would like more information about this machine or anything related to it's construction, please leave a comment. I'd love to be able to give back to the community that helped me make a piece of video game history come to life for me.

I made a light box (with help)

2008-05-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

My buddy Daniel was wanting to make a light box for his girlfriend since she's quite the artist, but has until now lacked the ability to properly back light her drawings as she makes them. I'm not much of an artist in that regard so I'm not familiar with how back lighting helps one draw but apparently it does. So Daniel and I decided to make her a light box.

We roved the local Lowes for some materials: an oak 1x2, a sheet of thin plywood, a sheet of clear plexiglass, some hinges, and some small LED tap lights and small fluorescent lights from wally-world next door.

Though we were both very tired we managed to cut the wood and paint the clear plastic with a frosting spray to help diffuse the light, and assemble it all into a working (if dim) light box. He presented it to her the next day and she was very happy with it, but since we were tired while making it there were some rough edges and the spray on the top panel was somewhat splotchy. I picked up the light box about a week later and use an extra sheet of plexi we'd gotten and sprayed it on a flat concrete surface since the fact that the first sheet was sitting on top of a milk crate somehow left the impression of a milk crate as the spray dried, possibly due to heat differences in the sheet. I also sanded and stained the box, as well as putting some rubber feet on it.

I then went about making some more powerful lights. A while ago I used the driver board from a burnt out CFL bulb to power a normal fluorescent tube, and was quite pleased with how well it worked, so I'd been saving any CFLs that had burnt out around the house as well as a few tubes that I'd had for a while. I put two tubes together and hot glued them into the box; it was much better lit now, even though one tube was more purple than the othter X(.

In any event, the light box works well and looks good now, and though I'm not sure what the use of it is, I am sure there is one and it appears that Daniel's artistic girlfriend is getting use from this box with lights they call a light box.

I made some small things

2008-05-20T18:07:00.001-07:00

Not everything I make is big enough to warrant it's own post, so here are some smaller thing's I've made.

The first thing I made was a 15 foot long rope made from smaller rope I braided together after a rope twisting tool I made couldn't hold up to the tension it needed to.

The next thing is pretty usual, an omelet I made with BBQ Vienna sausages up at my family's hunting camp when I went there to get some alone time last summer. It was my first omelet and I was proud of how well it came out. Very yummy.

I also made an "LED tree" from a couple of dead AA batteries and a pile of old green LEDs. It was a pretty neat little toy and stayed lit for a couple days on batteries that were pretty well dead. for any other use. I guess the batteries being drained so low already was why the LEDs didn't burn out without a resistor in the circuit. Organically shaped circuits are fun.

Santa's little helper here was a result of an old dead VCR and a slow Saturday at work. He's made from various components off the VCR's circuit board and the Christmas tree is made from the board itself along with some wire and LEDs. The light at the top actually lights up off a 9V battery.

That's all the mini-makings I've got for the moment. I guess I'll toss up some more after I snap some photos of more of my smaller projects. TTFN

I made a rake (and made a Zen garden look nice)

2008-05-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

I took a couple classes at FCCJ's South Campus last semester and while wandering around before class one day I found that there was a Zen sand garden that seemed to have been left unkempt for some time. I took a stick and drew out some broad lines in the sand and smoothed out the footprints, but it didn't look terribly amazing. After I got out of class I remembered that I'd found some thick walled bamboo rods discarded in a wooded pathway on the campus. I went there and got a few pieces, bored some holes in one piece with my knife, put some small sticks into the holes, and tied the whole bit to another, longer piece of bamboo for a handle. I'd made a very flimsy Zen rake.

I used it to go over the garden again, but it fell apart just as I finished, so I triumphantly walked back to my truck with the head of the rake dangling precariously back and forth so I could take it home and improve on it.

I wound up drilling out the holes for the tooth pegs, adding some extra supports, and sanding the bamboo. I used some bungee cords to hold the supports in place while the glue dried. It looks pretty nice and fairly authentic, though it's about twice as wide as a traditional rake. It lets me finish twice as fast, sometimes you don't have hours to meditate and rake sand between classes. I was pretty happy with it and it gave me something relaxing to do while waiting for classes. I also trimmed up the overgrown bamboo and trees around the garden. I did this for a while, but eventually had to use some Shoe Goo to attach and coat the corners of the supports so the wood glue wouldn't get re-softened and come loose.

I wound up getting tired of having to carry the rake around and eventually decided to leave it in the garden so I wouldn't have to carry it and so others could make use of it if they wanted to. I gave the whole thing a good coat of clear lacquer so it would last longer, wrote "Please return when done." on a piece of pipe, and put the pipe and rake in the garden. I left it the last day I had class for the semester, I wonder if it'll be there when I get back. Anyway, Here's a picture from right after I started raking the garden, I've got more here.

I made a deal, a friend mad, and a scooter run

2008-05-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

I troll around Craig's List pretty regularly. A few days ago I saw a listing for what looked like a Chinese scooter that had an orange and blue paint job. Here's the listing's body:

"I have a XING DUO scooter that is NOT RUNNING. I repeat NOT RUNNING. It ran great for about 6 months after I bought it used and then just stopped. Could be somthing really easy to fix, but I dont know. I dont have the time to deal with it. I took all the body plastic off and sold it. I have some of the original stuff that I took off when I first bought the scooter, but its not in the best shape. You can buy the fairings on ebay for about 100 bucks or so. EMAIL me if you are interested, and give me your BEST OFFER! I do mean Best offer, I just want to get rid of this thing!! Here are a few pictures......"

I offered him less and got it. Once I had it I couldn't find any name for it's model or manufacturer on the scooter or the title. It turned out the paint job was a pretty heinous spray paint job and almost all the body panels and seat had broken parts. I was still happy with the purchase though since those are just cosmetic and the engine looked to be in good shape. I saw it didn't have any gas, and the battery was dead flat (not uncommon for inexpensive Chinese scooters and bikes). I started by taking the battery cover off only to find out that the negative battery cable had come off the connector to the battery, An easy fix and possibly why the scooter "just stopped working" for the previous owner.

After that I had to head to work, where after several hours of research and a tangle of companies, I found the most likely suspect for the manufacturer: TANK, model Classic 50. There are a few differences, but this looks like it's mostly the same. Schwinn and others also sold the same model under other names, but it looks like TANK is the original make.

Today I cleaned the scooter up, repainted some of the parts that had caught the ugly brunt of the spray paint, and tried to get it road worthy by fixing the body plastics as well as is prudent. I wound up epoxying a piece of plexiglass into the back fender and screwed another into the bottom of the seat to make them hold ogether better, as well as using plenty of epoxy on other pieces. After that, I reassembled the whole thing, bending warped frame pieces back into place and figuring out how to keep what's left of the body plastics together. It didn't look good, but it didn't look bad either, and it was all pretty sturdy.

I filled up the gas tank and decided to try and kick start the little blue and orange monster to life. Turn the key, hold the brake, turn trottle a little, kick, kick, kick, kick-kick, *sputter*, kick, *sputter-putter*, KICK KICK, *sputter-putter-cough-cough-broooooooommmmmm*. IT'S WORKING! The only think that was really wrong (other than having the ugly tree fall on it) turned out to be that loose battery cable. And the battery, and the speedometer, and the gas needle, and the odometer (hey, the horn still honks), but the ugly scootling was running and I took it on a few victory laps around the yard to get a feel for how it handled.

Next I took it down the road to the local hardware store (it's so nice when yours hasn't gone out of business yet) and picked up a few bolts that were missing. I had to spend several minutes kicking the scooter to get it to start again. The sun in front of the store was beaming down as if to laugh and delight in wanting me to kick until I passed out from heat stroke, but eventually it started up again. A new battery is a high priority now.

By now it was time for me to clean up some and head to work, where I found this site, specializing in parts for TANK's vehicles. They look like they have what I need, but I'm not sure so I sent them a few photos and asked if they could get me the side panels, back fender, and a seat. We'll see how that goes.

On the way to work though, and while I was working on the scooter, I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine who's very opinionated about motorcycles and scooters, and is of the distinct opinion that scooters are the scum of the earth. Thus my obtaining this scooter is a betrayal of his trust and I'll have to wait until I can break his feet-forward bigotry before I'm fully in his good graces again. C'este la vie. I just had to put it to him as being like a minibike that's street legal for him to give me a temporary stay of execution.

I'll update this post once I get word on the replacement parts, but for now you can see more photos of the ugly scootling on this Flickr set.

(EDIT: 5-27-08)

Over the last several days I've been working more one the Ugly Scootling. Here's an overview of what's gone on.

First the body: I cleaned up the body panels a little to scrape off the worst of the rough spots in the old paint and disassembled all the body panels and things attached to them so I could paint them without overspraying all over the scooter. I didn't bother getting too worked up about imperfections since there's no way I can get the body back to looking new without many hours of work and ordering new body panels. I filled in the large hole in the back fender with JB Weld. I didn't bother making it look too great since if I want to get the scooter looking like new I'll just order some new body panels. At the moment I'd rather spend any money I spend on it on repairing parts like the starter.

Speaking of the starter, I ordered a new one off of eBay last week and it came in today right as I was finishing up the cosmetic work. I bolted it on and it works fine. No more kick starting every time now! The arch of my right foot is happy for that. The only thing that concerns me is that from what I can gather the starters on these Chinese bikes are usually pretty short-lived. I'm wondering what I might be able to do to make sure this one doesn't kick the bucket as soon as it's replacement did....

I also got all of the lights working. The tail light bulb was blown (not even a trace of filament left in it), and the rest of the lights seem to be fine now.

I made a robot's head

2008-05-14T06:01:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I realize I've got too much junk. This realization usually comes after I've had said junk for a while and when I decided to toss out a pile of junk, there was a smaller pile that I couldn't bring myself to toss. The pile had some parts from a couple of old camcorders, random motors and lights, an old joystick from an old arcade game, and some buttons and switches.

I didn't want to toss this stuff, but at the same time I didn't quite know what to do with it, but I decided that I'd have to make use of it or toss it. I started looking at two parts, a viewfinder and a lens from two different camcorders and thought they looked like eyes, so I decided to make a robot of some sort.

I carried an old shoe box stuffed full with parts along with some solder and my soldering iron to work and over the course of my shift used the down time to cobble together the robot (or at least it's head) and mounted it to a metal case with the controls.

You can turn the head, zoom the eye inand out, record, and play back up to 20 seconds of sound. Or at least you could. A few days after I made it the little guy took a dive off a counter and was "rapidly disassembled" by the floor. I decided to put it back together, but the sound recorder doesn't work now. ohh well, something to work on another day. I'm just glad that most of it survived the fall. I also used much more hot glue to hold it together this time.

I made a bookshelf

2008-05-13T19:41:00.001-07:00

I needed a book shelf for a very large amount of hardbound National Geographic books I got free. I made it with a couple nice pieces of plywood and some 2x2. That bookshelf is double loaded now and almost completely full, so I might need to make another one soon. I made it pretty much like it looks like it was made. I attached the sides to the top and bottom shelf, then filled in the middle shelves, and finally attached the back.

I should have made the shelves a little higher so that the books could stack to the ends, but that's okay since the ends still hold most books fine.

I made instructables

2008-05-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

A while ago I made some pretty cool things and wanted to share them with anyone who might want to recreate it for their own purposes. Two were light control boxes for a small, not too expensive band light kit, the other was a USB guitar for a clone of Guitar Hero called Frets on Fire. I made directions and notes on how I made these on Instructables. The first was a dimmer based three light controller I call the Band Blinder, the second is a sound driven power trigger I call the Band Blinker, and the third is the USB guitar.

And by the way, the guitar is red in real life. It's not pink :P.

I made a bamboo bow and arrow

2008-05-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

A while ago I went to my dad's hunting camp and while I was there I decided to make some use of the small bamboo that grows in one spot behind the camp. I had some flint that another member of the camp had collected, which I practiced knapping into some arrow heads, which is a hard skill to obtain). I must have broken many more peices of flint than I wound up even getting somewhere close to triangular. Eventually I got a few good looking candidates though.

Then I took a page from this instructables page and used some twine I had to bundle together several pieces of bamboo and used some pipe glue that was laying around to glue together the bundles and the bowstring, which I made from several runs of twine.

I then made the arrow from some turkey feathers and a nice straight piece of bamboo. This was especially nice looking when done and when I shot it out of both my small compound bow and the bamboo bow it went straight and about as far as a normal practice arrow. The bow only went about half as far as my small compound bow, but I was still pleasantly surprised at it's performance. Over the next few days as the bamboo dried the bundles got looser and it lost tension, but it still makes a nice piece on my wall.

I'll definitely make more bamboo arrows, and as a result of making the bow I've been on an archery kick a little and I'm working on an oak longbow now, though my other projects have been keeping that on the back burner for a while now.

I made shade

2008-05-13T18:17:00.000-07:00

There's a beach not too many people know the location of. It's just a trail off the side of the road that goes about 1/3 of a mile back to a beach covered in dead trees, driftwood, and the occasional peice of junk that's washed up. It's called Black Rock Beach by everyone I know who knows of it, though the name is something of a misnomer, the black rocks are more of a hard rock-like soil. In any event, there's not a whole lot of shade, and I like to make things, so when I went out to the beach a few weeks ago I decided to collect driftwood and make a place in the shade.

The sun was out and burning hot by the time I'd biked down to the beach and as I walked near the top of the beach I saw many peices of lumber I guess have washed or rusted off of people's docks and found there way to the beach on some high tide. I decided since I wasn't going to swim in the still frigid water I would make a place to get out of the sun, a little tiki hut over the side of a half-fallen tree. I gathered any long wood I could find and started to make a nice little frame, but the more I built, the farther I had to go for more material. This led to some interesting wondering around behind sandy underbrush and more than one box turtle giving me an odd look from inside it's den, including the one that I didn't realize my tiki hut was a neighbor to. I called him Yurtle and tried to keep the noise down after I saw him.

I covered the frame with the reeds that had washed up along with whatever else I could find. It was pretty cool in a swiss family robinson sort of way. I like to make things like this so I can tell myself if I ever landed on a deserted island I'd do ok.

I made music (with lots of help)

2008-05-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

With the help of my friends Daniel and Justin, I made some music recently under the group name "Anderdown". We're planning on making more as well as practicing some cover songs. We're also trying to get a full band together, so we need a drummer. Any drummers in the audience?

You can get an earful of me singing here: http://www.myspace.com/anderdown. I'm still getting used to the sound of my voice and still trying to figure out how to sing with the songs we're doing, but I think those two turned out fairly well.

And what's with the city? It's a composited image I made of the mythic city of Anderdown.

I made a steampunk ray gun

2008-05-13T17:21:00.001-07:00

I've been looking from the edges at steampunk subculture for some time now. For the uninitiated, steampunk is the the idea of trying to imagine what the things we have today or may have in the future might look and be like if they were made with the style and technology available during the Victorian era. If you've seen the movie Wild Wild West or watched the Firefly TV series, these could be concidered steampunk in some ways. I highly recommend watching Firefly by the way.

I love this a la carte re-imagining of the past/future, and decided to make something from this world which never was. I decided that a "Pulse Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Collected Aether" (PASECA) device (A ray gun) would be just the ticket.

Since I don't have many gears (a common theme in steampunk design) laying around, I decided to go more for the look of coils and linkages in my design. I use the term design loosely though since there wasn't any real design. I started by going to Lowes, grabbing an armful of copper and brass odds and ends, going back for a shopping cart, then setting peices around one another until I saw something I liked. I think it turned out quite nicely since I've had no real experience working with copper/brass soldering. I'll have to write up a nice product/spec sheet on some tea-aged paper with a nice pen to go with it. This is what the PASECA device looked like part-way through construction. The hissing sound of quenching hot metal is very satisfying.

Since I wanted the guage on the back to be at some value, I made the tank it's attached to air tight and added a tire valve to it so I can have it really hold pressure. I've also added some leather to the front of the handle as a better grip. Without further Adieu, here it is:

Next time I make something steampunk-like I'd like to make it with more brass, which is a much easier metal to solder to than copper, but they're both expensive as heck right now so I'll also be putting off the next project until I get enough scrapped dodads together for at least most of it.

And Here's a photo of myself with the ray gun in somewhat Victorian garb. I need to finish my goggles....

I (re)made a guitar

2008-05-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

Starting about 6 months ago, my nephew was getting into playing guitar and was showing some real promise and skill. He already had a couple, but really had his eye on a red Gibson SG. Being as I didn't have the 1000+ dollars to get him one for Christmas getting him one was out of the question until I traded an old motorcycle for a couple of guitars.

One of these was a very beat up and terribly modified Epiphone SG. It played pretty well (after an hour of tidying up ground loops and loose wires in the wiring cavity) but was still in terrible cosmetic and electrical shape. I read up a little and already had some experience working on guitars and figured that a custom painted and rebuilt guitar would be a nice gift and wouldn't be terribly hard. I was wrong.

I started by disassembling the whole thing down to it's base parts. I started a list of the problems with it.

Problems:
* Missing knob
* Ugly skull knobs
* Spray painted Zach Wyld bull's eye
* Flat black spray paint over entire rest of guitar
* Missing almost all pot/jack mounting hardware (washers, nuts, etc...)
* Chipped wood on back and under two knobs
* Grime and super glue stains on fretboard
* Roller nut attached by super glue
* Wiring (total rat nest)
* Stripped screws on a couple places
* Locking tuners missing top nuts

I could tell this thing would be a lot of work, but I also wanted to see if I could get it looking good, I wanted to give my nephew a nice axe, and I didn't have any money in it, so if I ruined it it wouldn't be too bad.

Next I needed to clean off the old paint. I thought the best way to do this would be with paint stripper. I liberally coated the back in paint stripper after a trip to the hardware store for supplies, but after getting through the top coat of spray paint, the factory candy apple red (damn! the color he wanted!) was too strong for the chemical to do much more than turn a little easier for me to pry loose from the wood than if it was dry. I moved on to trying to chip the paint off, since if the stock paint was in good condition I would be able to just restore that. That went out the window when the paint on the front had deep gouges where an exacto knife had been used to carve out some "sweet flames". I moved on to sandpaper.

60 grit sandpaper is a wonderful thing. Just a couple hours and what would be the start of Popeye-like forearm muscles later, I'd gotten the SG down to it's bare wood. I'd gotten the paint off the neck with the side of my trusty paint scraping knife. I was on a roll, but before I started spraying paint all willy-nilly I decided to do some research. The articles on ProjectGuitar.com are a wonderful resource for restoring and repairing guitars, but the more I read, the more I realized that with less than two weeks before Santa made his rounds to gorge himself on cookies there was no way I'd be able to finish in time. Instead, I gave my nephew the bare wood body, neck, and a sandwich bag of electronics and mounting hardware, and told him I was sorry it wasn't done, but I'd have it done before his birthday. He was ecstatic and excited to have me building him a guitar.

In the mean time I also had to get some parts. The SG came with some very nice EKG pickups, which just happened to be the very same ones a friend of mine was looking to put into an explorer he'd just gotten. I was wanting to go with less heavy sounding pickups for a broader range, and the stock explorer pickups were just about exactly what I was looking for. I traded the pickups out of his guitar and helped install the EKGs, then went to get some knobs and pickup bezels (probably not the right term) since the ones that came with the SG were terrible and beat up.

I then got back to the finish for the body. I'd discovered that the bridge mounting holes, which I'd assumed were molded into the body, were actually metal. They'd just been too covered in paint to tell. I sanded the body down to 200 grit sandpaper since the 60 grit left the body about as smooth as velcro. I then sprayed several coats of clear over that to seal the wood, leaving each coat at least one day to dry between. I wanted this to look as close to a professional paint job as spray paint from Lowes would get me. With each coat I sanded the body to help slowly smooth out imperfections. it was pretty much the same story with the color coat and clear coat. Hang body in garage, choke on paint fumes, wait a couple days, sand, repeat.

As the body got smoother and shinier I felt better and better about the decision to go with spray paint. Cut to two months later (and about 4 months of off and on time into this project) and I'd gotten ready to spray the second of many coats of clear coat on. As I sprayed, the clear stopped being clear. It turned into a milky white leaving the guitar looking like I'd ruined the paint somehow. I didn't know what had gone wrong. I'd done everything the same as before, the clearcoat was from the same can, and it wasn't too humid. I went to bed since it was late and I didn't know what else to do.

I came out the next day after class to inspect the damage and to my wonder, the guitar was a nice shiny red again. It turned out that the clear coat just behaved that way, so I added the last 7 or so coats of clear (WHAT A PAIN!) and got ready to start wet sanding. By this point my forearms had gotten tough enough that I felt like I had the wrist strength to bend steel. I guess pressing on something and doing who knows how many reps of back and forward for a few months will do that. Wet sanding is interesting, you don't feel like you're doing anything and progress is so slow you have no idea when it'll be done since "just a little more" could easily mean from 1-3 hours. Anyway, my nephew's birthday on St. Patrick's day was coming up quick, so I dedicated every spare minute I had to getting this guitar done before then. Wet sanding takes forever.

After I'd gotten the body to as near a perfectly smooth surface as I could, I used rubbing compound on it to bring it to a nice shine. I could finally see myself in it and see the work I'd done starting to look like a finished part of a guitar. It was about 4 days before people around the world would start upchucking green beer.

I mounted The parts I could, but there was still a problem with the roller nut, I had no way to make it stay or figure out how high to mount it. I cleared off all the super glue in about an hour, and swapped the tuning machines from my other guitar onto the SG's headstock and wired the electronics that night (it was the day before the party. I'd have to work on it some from work the next day before the party.

I wound up getting the last odds and ends finished, including a complete rewire since the one I'd done the previous night was totally wrong. Talk about cutting it close. I put the guitar in it's bag not even knowing if it worked and headed to present it. When I got to the party, I carried it in and told my nephew that I didn't get him anything other than the guitar for his birthday, but that since I'd already given him the guitar for Christmas, his birthday present was all the work, time, and brain cells I'd put into the guitar since then. It did wor and he loved it. People at the party could hardly believe him when he said I'd made it. I'm now known by his friends as "my uncle who made me the guitar". That kicks ass.
If I'd known how much work it would take to do this before starting would I have done it? Maybe not, but I think this way it's worth a lot more than a guitar I'd bought. I hope he gets many years of use and enjoyment out of it. You can see more photos from making this guitar on this Flickr set.

I make things

2008-03-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

My name's Ronnie. I make things. Sometimes they're useful, sometimes they look cool, sometimes they're both. Sometimes it's things you can touch, sometimes they're things you think about or see or hear. I needed a place to show off the things I make, so I made this blog. I like to make things. I hope the things I make can make you think or laugh or smile.