The "i made dis" thread

squirrel picnic table
Hmm... :think: My neighbour feeds the squirrels that roam the area around the building. I may be inspired!

Also, this belongs in the Awesome Thread as well.
 
So that's what it is! We were all pretty confused when we saw it on the chat. It's brilliant. :LOL:

Yeah, I didn't think that I should put the phone where you lot could see what I was doing. I couldn't have the audio on, because it caused a feedback loop for you all.

I think we could do random live streams of FG members doing random things and it could be a hit! :ROFLMAO:


Hmm... :think: My neighbour feeds the squirrels that roam the area around the building. I may be inspired!

Also, this belongs in the Awesome Thread as well.

I wish I could take credit for the idea, but both Gena and I had seen them on the internet.

Sadly I have no plans to offer. I just started cutting boards and ended up with this. The legs were originally longer, but I decided to shorten them after the first mock up.
 
A friend sold me a welder last year and showed me how to use it. Here are a few things I've made with it.

First, any welder needs a table to work on that won't catch fire.

Step 1: Raw materials, mostly from the per pound scrap pile at the metal supply shop.
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Step 2: Fashion them into a rectangular box.
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Step 3: Add wheels, and somehow get that 200lb plate up top.
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Step 4: Add huge vise, and grind the rust off
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Then I whipped up these saw horses from the pallet that @Der Stig 's Lexus rock sliders arrived on.

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They are a copy of a design of some about 50 year old ones that were in my Grandma's garage.

Next project was a proper cart for my Kamado smoker.

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@Nabster and I got the basic structure done in a day.

Then it was time for the finishing touches.

First build a door
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Fit said door
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Add sides and floor from cheap cedar fence boards.
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Now I could have bought a door latch for about $2, but what's the fun in that?

How about some GROSS OVERKILL!!!

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All done!

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Dude both of those are awesome. I've wanted a smoker for a while now but living in a 3 person household with a vegan fiancée and a recently vegetarian son it seems kind of pointless.

I did cook a stunning burger last night, made of real cow, and there was a Chicken Tikka Balti in the order that arrived from our local Tandoori place on Saturday.
 
Dude both of those are awesome. I've wanted a smoker for a while now but living in a 3 person household with a vegan fiancée and a recently vegetarian son it seems kind of pointless.

Pointless? Psychological warfare is the best secondary use for a smoker.

Kinda remind me of that lady in Australia who sued her neighbors because the BBQ smell was disturbing her.
 
Dude both of those are awesome. I've wanted a smoker for a while now but living in a 3 person household with a vegan fiancée and a recently vegetarian son it seems kind of pointless.

I'm sorry to hear that.
 
Love the welding projects, curious to hear how you used the welder for the sawhorses. :LOL:

Dude both of those are awesome. I've wanted a smoker for a while now but living in a 3 person household with a vegan fiancée and a recently vegetarian son it seems kind of pointless.

I'm no veggie but home smoked veggies should go down well and you could slip a bit of cheese or sausage in there. :wicked:
 
@Matt2000 As you can see in the first photo I was working on the ground like a peasant. I used my second favorite tool for those, the DeWalt 20v cordless impact driver.

I've cooked a ton of veggies for my vegetarian girlfriend on that smoker, they come out great!
 
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@Matt2000 As you can see in the first photo I was working on the ground like a peasant. I used my second favorite tool for those, the DeWalt 20v cordless impact driver.

I've cooked a ton of veggies for my vegetarian girlfriend on that smoker, they come out great!

Big cordless impacts are great, not really had enough opportunities to use my 1000Nm Makita but it gets the job done.

Just re-read my post about veggies and it could be mis-interpreted in so many way, not going to change it now though. :LOL:
 
One more recent project.

I convinced @Nabster and @Der Stig to help me completely reorganize my garage and build new shelving to hold all of my useless crap.

First, everything had to come out. Yes, it did all fit in there.
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New back wall shelf unit
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New side wall unit
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Full of junk again, but believe it or not, this is a huge improvement.
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I have not had that much floor space to walk around with everything in the garage in years. It also helped that I dumped the bikes I was no longer riding.
 
I've been doing some garage organization and purging lately. Soon it'll have to be replaced though. I mean if the floors need replaced, the walls are separating and the roof is bad, is there anything to save?

So you can build bigger and better!

I'm lucky that mine seems to be in pretty good shape structurally. Someone did ram a car into the back wall at some point so there was a cracked stud we had to sister. There are also quite a few gaps so everything gets extremely dusty. I think that the current setup is the final form of this garage. TO get anything better, I'd have to move or bulldoze.

For comparison, here is what it looked like when I first moved in.

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And this was recently before the redo.

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So much better!
 
I need to reorganise the shed. Part of the storage is an old Welsh dresser that we no longer use nor want but it's not a very efficient solution.

I grabbed a couple of sets of bifold doors as part of a bundle of timber someone had on Freegle. I'll grab some used scaffold boards from my local wood recycling project and make a much better solution. I'll post before and after pics in time.
 
Bifold doors? They weren't...

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...were they?
 
I wanted to post this somewhere other than the tech random thoughts thread, so this is about the button box I made years ago. After watching some videos of Alien: Isolation I realised that I had inherently modelled this off the buttons seen in the game and the Alien universe in general - big red and green illuminated buttons.

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So wrote new code to make the LEDs fade like the doors in the game.

My phone completely fails to pick up the colour correctly but you get the idea. Code is a little complex but it essentially changes the brightness between 0 and 255 on a PWM pin, adding or subtracting a pre-determined number to the brightness value every 30 milliseconds. At the end of the cycle the analogue signal is swapped for a digital high signal.

 
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About 2 years ago, we startd an art project. After seeing something like this at client's offices, we thought it would something we could make for our living room. Especially once I started seeing how expensive something like this was selling for on Etsy (close to $3k for ones the size we wanted), and especially especially when I found some pre-milled ash 2" x 2" x 30" boards on clearance at a local lumber supplier.

It got inturrupted by a home remodel where we added a master suite to the bck of the house, but we made some progress on this wall art piece a weekend or two ago. i finished cutting all of he perimeter pieces with the appropriate notches, adding the mounting hardware to the back, and started staining using up whatever stains we had sitting around in the garage, some of them almost 20 years old.

Still a little more finish work to do, then adding the pieces around the perimeter to hide the shallow false back. It'll appear about 3" deep ad it's thickest, but only the perimeter is hte full depth. The rest of about 5/8" shallower, so that I had some solid plywood to screw the mounts into, a flat surface to glue everything to, and to reduce weight.

So far nothing's glued down yet, so there won't be any gaps/alignment issues. If i remember right, the total piece will be 30" x 55", and will hang above our sofa in the living room.

in the bottom photo, you can see the plywood sticking out on all sides. i've got pieces with notches cut into their backside so that they wrap around that ledge, making the whole thing look like one huge end grain butcher block. The plywood will also help prevent cracking as everything further dries/expands/contracts with the seasons.

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It's going to look great when it's up, I agree that it'll be tricky to put up purely due to weight. Maybe grab a big forstner bit and drill out a pocket on the back of each block, the weight saving would be significant. Of course you don't want to compromise the surface area for gluing, wood glue is very strong stuff though.
 
A french cleat running the length of that thing to hang it will be more than enough to safely hang it. Not only will it be easy to hang using one, but you get to secure the cleat on the wall across every stud it spans, so the support is more than adequate.

See also these videos from John Heisz which immediately popped into my mind seeing your build. He made a very similar thing but even heavier.


 
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