Dude, Seriously... Don't Screw With Those Guys.

Not so much a "debate team" as... Well... Have you ever seen Beyond Thunderdome?

Planter Project

Springtime!  Time to plant.  Man, I miss the old stone garden. The new place has a backyard and other folks in the neighborhood have pretty big gardens but our layout is not really the greatest for that sort of thing.  The path of the sun is wrong, the land too hilly, the sprinklers are in the way, etc. The best we can do is get some pots and planters and do some “square foot” gardening on the back deck.

Hey, let's do that then.  

We went to Lowe’s and found these:

They are made of, according to their labels, "heartwood".  Nice. Why don't they just say they’re made from "trees" or "stuff" or "tree stuff"? Can't a brother even get a genus up in here, what, what?  I mean, they look like they are cedar and I wouldn't expect them to be anything else, really, but why wouldn’t they have just said that?  

The Lowe’s website does say they are "stained to help resist the elements outdoors".  I am not really sure how to read that. All of my responses to that claim start off “Well... yeah, but...” and then just sort of peter out, shake their heads, and wander off.

In any case the planters are thin, flimsy, and expensive - the small one is $30 and the big one is $60. Plus they don't come with legs.   Well, that won't do...  

I bought a bunch of cedar, some spruce 2x4s, outdoor stain/sealant and got to work.  The lumber to recreate the the big one (larger area and deeper, but with legs) was $40. The second, smaller one was just a “Henry the Eighth, I Am” project (“second verse, same as the first”) and cost $20.  The stain/sealant was $8. Here are the pics:

Cheaper, larger, more sturdy, made from a known substance, and likely to last a few seasons. Plus I have plenty of extra stain/sealant left for other projects.  Groovy.

So far we have tomato, onion, green pepper, banana pepper, radish, dill, basil, and cucumber (to be trained up a trellis).  I will probably build another couple of smaller planters soon.

The clay pot was recovered from a cache of stuff I found under the deck when we moved into this place... along with what looked like a new chainsaw.  But, hey, that’s another boring story for another time... 

The Pit and the Paper Shredder

My wife brought a disused paper shredder down from the attic this weekend and asked me if I could fix it.  She said she overloaded it at one time and it stopped working (Hey... We all do it).  I told her I would look at it.

I opened it up expecting to see the mechanism completely crammed with refrigerator box chunks and giant copper staples but it looked just fine.  The switch was ok, and there didn’t appear to be an accessible fuse that could have blown.  There’s no real circuitry to speak of.  None of the wires appeared disconnected or damaged.  Hmph.  Burnt out motor.  Oh well, time for a new shredder.

Oh my God... what is this? 

I could, with very little effort, move the 115V power line into the (thankfully unmovable) choppy dealies.  I am sure that heat, gravity, and vibration would have done that at a random and not-so-distant time in the future if the motor hadn’t been burnt out.  Arcs and sparks inches above a bin of fluffy dry paper?  Nice.

The... um... fellows that made this device should really consider hiring a better safety or Q.C. person.

D20 Project (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

Oh, don’t get me wrong… It was sturdy just the way it was, but as this thing was coming together I decided to give it a different purpose than “sitting on my desk in the guest bedroom, occasionally being moved to the attic by the embarrassed wife whenever we had visitors”.

It would need to be much stronger if it was going to spend the rest of its life outside in the elements as a Geocache like I now hoped.  Really, a lot of the inspiration for using it this way came from an awesome cache I found a few months ago.  See, someone had taken a full-sized mailbox, camo-painted it, and mounted it on a pole in a park about 50 feet off a hiking trail (the actual cache was inside).  Before I knew it was there it was totally invisible - now that I know it’s there I can’t not see it when I hike that trail.

I didn’t want to paint the wood, so I stained the main structure dark then I glued tapered dowels (stained a lighter color) in the gaps (well… with the exception of the “20”… more on that in a bit) like you see in the pic. 

After considering a variety of ways to neatly stencil and rout the numbers I decided in the end just to do them freehand to give the die a “Oh, I meant to do that” rough-hewn look – quicker, good enough, and way less error-prone, you see. So I just used a Dremmel to carve the numbers (using a real d20 as a template for number placement and orientation) and stained them the same color as the dowels.  I think it turned out ok.

I carefully pried the “20” off the main structure and epoxied a surplus water bottle to the underside of the triangle.  After the epoxy had set, the water bottle was covered in camouflage duct tape to obscure the corporate logo and the bright red plastic.  I drilled a hole in the triangle and mounted an extra cupboard door knob to it.  The remaining dowels were then epoxied to this triangle and the “lid” was finished.  

I weatherproofed the die with several coats of gloss spar sealant – the type of sealant used to protect the wooden parts of some boats.  The actual cache is meant to be the water bottle itself which should keep its contents dry well beyond the expected lifetime of the mostly-cedar container (a year or two would be pretty good).

I used a 4-foot piece of aluminum pole and three extra shelf brackets I had laying around to create the stand for this and the whole thing was camo-ed like you see in the pic.  The stand will be hammered two feet into the ground which should make it stable, keep it elevated off the forest floor, and still leave enough room to use a cordless drill to secure the die in place.

Done and done.  But here’s the rub. 

I scouted out a couple of promising locations, my favorite being one about 300 feet off a main hiking path in a really nice park in the area.  Even though I think it would be neat to use this as a Geocache container, and though I have no problem with going out to the spot and installing it, I am really not overly interested in being its CO (cache owner).  

There are a few reasons for this – none too big or important.  

1. Getting a permit for the park I looked at would require me to take off from work (the person who approves them only works Monday through Friday).
2. The park I mentioned is a 40-minute drive from my house so getting to it to provide maintenance, change the log, etc, would be kind of a hassle.  
3. I use my phone’s GPS which can be pretty bouncy in the woods on the best of days and I want to make sure I give precise coordinates. Nothing worse than spending 30 minutes looking for something in the brambles that turns out to be 100 feet from where it should be, you know?  
4. I am only a “basic” member, and, apparently, there are Geocaches out there that are only visible to “premium” members.  Why should that affect me?  Well, let’s say I scout out the location, take off from work, get the permit filled out and signed, install the cache, and submit the cache for official review.  A couple of days later I get an email from the reviewer saying that the location is denied because it is too close to one of these “premium” caches I had no idea existed.  The whole process would need to be repeated… Of course… I guess I could just spend the $30/year…

Like I said, minor stuff.  Borderline whiny, even.

I may end up changing my mind about all that and taking on the CO job myself but in the meantime I think I will ask around the Hampton Roads area to see if any local Geocachers might be interested in using this as their own container.  I will keep you posted either way.  In the meantime, it sits in my garage.

(To be continued?)

D20 Project (Part I)

I got an intro-level bandsaw for Christmas last year and it has been very useful for making short work out of tiny things I would normally have to manually (and messily) cut free-hand or attempt to cut on the table saw.  Come to think of it, the table saw option would probably be even more messy, what with all the blood and detached fingers laying around afterwards.  

Also, it would probably be scream-ier.

After the last project I was looking for something to do that was pretty much the opposite of building yet another table or picture frame, but still within my very limited skill set.  Also, I wanted to keep the number of steps small and the cost as low as possible.  I happened to glance at a set of gaming dice I had on the near-random-item shelf in my garage, and I had my project.

Using the equipment I had access to and limited by the amount of time I was willing to spend on this project, I knew there was no way I could get perfectly uniform triangles that, when assembled, would result in a perfect 20-sided Platonic solid with no gaps.  Sure, I suppose I could have farmed out the cutting to eMachineShop or had someone 3D print me the parts, but owning a giant, flawless d20 that I just glued together like a kit would be pointless... Well, even more pointless than building one myself from scratch is what I mean.  

Shut up.

Anyway, I know that the angle adjustments on my table saw are maybe good for plus or minus one degree, depending on what angle you are actually at.  The angle adjustments on the bandsaw are even less precise.  Moving the guides around adds even more uncertainty unless you want to measure and re-measure after each and every adjustment.  I had no desire to spend days and days making sure I was cutting cheap cedar boards to worryingly high tolerances.  I wanted to make this project as assembly-line-like as possible while doing all the steps myself, so a minimum-hassle approach was needed.

Me so lazy...

A 20-sided die has 20 equilateral triangles for faces. I didn’t really care what the final size of the die was going to be, just as long as it was “pretty big”.  After doing what turned out to be a large amount of completely unnecessary geometry, I stumbled into this now-obvious method for cutting my triangles without needing to measure anything:

1) Place board to be cut between the blade and the fence and note the width.  My cedar boards were labeled 6” x 6’ meaning they were actually 5 1/2 inches wide.  This stupid world...

2) With the blade perpendicular to the work surface, change the angle of the slide to -30 degrees and lock it down.  You won’t need to move it again.

3) Line up the corner of the board with the blade and make your first cut.  Discard the piece you just sawed off.

4) Flip the board and slide it until it is just touching the fence.

5) Move the fence out of the way.  Why?  Well, I needed to because the kickback cowl on my saw is not designed to prevent kickback of pieces that are smaller than the blade diameter.  With the fence touching the workpiece and, having nowhere else to go, my first new triangle shot back at me like a ninja star once the last little bit of wood had been cut through,  nearly shattering my thumb.  Of course, if that’s your idea of a good time, by all means don’t move the fence.

6) Cut the board.  Congratulations! You now have an equilateral triangle with sides that are about 1.15 times the board width (the math is left as an exercise for the student).

7) Move the fence back into its original place.

8) Repeat 4 through 8 until you run out of wood or you have enough triangles to do whatever you need triangles for.

Ok.  I have 20 cedar triangles and it took me about 30 minutes.  Awesome.  Now what?

For the next step I needed to find out what angle the triangles needed to be mounted to each other at.  According to the Internet, the dihedral angle between two adjacent sides of a regular icosahedron is 138.2 degrees, so, (obviously) I needed to set my bandsaw to cut 20.9 degree chunk out of each side of the triangles. Ah, Wikipedia... you know so much... Now if only you knew the best way to recover from an atomic wedgie and get my lunch money back... Sigh...

I made a jig to hold the triangles with the hope that it would help me quickly up my bandsaw cuts.  It didn’t work out.  The pic to the left shows one of the triangles after cutting the three sides to what should have been the correct angle (or at least close enough).  It looks fine in the pic but the cuts were actually way too non-uniform for even my pretty liberal definition of “good enough”. 

So, then, time to go to Plan B.  Well, really, time to scream goodbye to Plan A in a drunken rage, angrily invent Plan B, realize that “Plan B” is actually a trade name for something totally unrelated, then calm down and settle for Plan C. No, wait... that’s taken, too.  Oh, you gotta be kidding me!  All the way to Plan H?  Fine.  “Plan I” it is.

Back at the table saw I set the guide angle to zero and the blade angle to 21 degrees. I cut and flipped the board until I had enough wood for 30 wedges, which I then cut in half on the bandsaw.  I glued the wedge halves to the “bad” side of the wood like you see in the pic. 

After the glue dried I drilled pilot holes in the wedges and began to attach the triangles to each other.  The nails helped keep some of the pieces in place while the glue dried, but I found using a self-tapping wood screw instead of nails worked much better. 

After attaching five more triangles to each of the “end caps”, I had two ten-triangle halves that fit together a lot more nicely than I thought would have been possible. Here it is after the halves were glued together.  

Although I think that the “gaps” you see between the pieces (a result of the “Plan I” approach and the fact that the wood I used was thicker than zero inches) look cool, they needed to be filled with something to make the entire structure a lot more sound.  

(To be continued...)

Does This Taste Hamster-y To You?

You told me Fluffy went to go live on a farm, you liar!  I hate you I hate you I hate... What?  Oh... polyethylene terephthalate... Of course... Sorry.

Speaking of Fluffy, this (and the other pics in this Tumblr set) made me try and fail to suppress hysterical giggles for about 15 minutes at my desk Friday.  I'm... I'm a horrible person.

Ok. I'm Back.

Well, after nearly two months off I decided to actually flip the ON/OFF switch on this machine to ON and type something (instead of just threatening to do so) .  It’s been a pretty active couple of months.  I will spare you the blow-by-blow and just give you the Cliff’s Notes summary.  Enjoy.

Sold Two Vehicles, Bought One.  It’s a big black truck!  Not too much to say about it other than it is waaayyy better than the death-by-a-thousand-cuts-Prius could ever hope to be.  Sure, it has the turning radius and the mileage of a freshly-torpedoed World War II battleship but, hey, it’s a big black truck, and you can’t put a price on that.  Well, the dealership can, obviously... And the bank, I suppose...  Look, you know what I mean.

Bought a Bike. A Jamis Allegro X Sport.  It’s also black.  After not being on a bike for over a decade and a half my test ride around the bike store parking lot felt like I was imitating the first few seconds in the life of a newborn giraffe.  I got my “sea legs” back pretty quickly though and I found out that if I ride every nook and cranny in my neighborhood all the cul-du-sacs and side streets add up to over 11 miles which was surprising as hell.  Seeing me ride it instantly got my kid past his “Calvin and Hobbes”-esque fear of his own bike which was totally worth the price of admission right there.  What else... Oh, yeah, I hope the fellows who wrote the “instruction manual” for the odometer/speedometer I bought are found and brought to justice someday.  It’s just an odometer - not a Space Shuttle.  Keep it simple.  Also, maybe limit the number of languages the bed-sheet-sized fold-out manual is in to under 1,200.  English, German, Chinese... All fine.  Tamarian, Akkadian, and “the Hula”... Dudes, rein it in a little.

Went to Disney World - The drive down was kind of a pain.  The insane storms from the Virginia border to the Florida border made it feel like we were in a 10-hour-long car wash.  Once we got there, though, the weather was great.  We walked about 40 miles that week, I got me a turkey leg,  I got to watch my four-year-old fight Darth Maul with a bunch of other kids at the Jedi Training Academy, and I even got to ride Space Mountain (meh - the scary part is realizing the coaster is almost as old as I am). I have no idea what 1980’s stand-up comedians are on about, but in no instance did we wait more than 15 minutes to ride anything, even with a crowd level of 9.3 out of 10.   My wife’s planning book and app really nailed it.  Awesome, awesome trip!

Went to LegoLand - Meh. 

Built a Giant d20 - Actually, I was going to post on this tonight but, for some reason, the file on my fob isn’t readable and I need to retrieve a backup copy. I’ll do that next week.  Here it is mid-construction.

Updated the Geo-Junk Clock - Hmmm... a couple items just refuse to stay stuck with hot glue, it seems.  I guess I will use epoxy for those in the future.  Anyway, I should hit 250 caches this weekend.  I should have reached that milestone last week but I forgot the cable to my fully-charged solar charger so the battery in my phone was getting dangerously low.  I was forced to cut the 12-mile hike down to eight and got back to my truck just before the screen went blank.  I will remember the cable from now on, I hope.

Nike + Kinect Training - I took the third month fit test and scored slightly worse than I did for the second month one.  Bummer.  I blame a recent cold and the week off for the Florida trip, I suppose.  I am sitting at just under 12,000 points.  Oh,  I have a note for my virtual trainer.  Look, I know I have “struggled with these in the past” and I know that you think that “today, I know you are really going to nail these”.  After all, you have said those things for various exercises at least six times a week for the last ten weeks.  Isn’t the fact I am no longer barfing up vital organs enough for you?  Just freakin’ let it go, man...