The "i made dis" thread

Heah, I'mI'm using the metal z-bar "Hang man" hangers. Each one is listed as 155lbs, and I'm using two of them, and each one will hit two studs, and whereever it doesn't hit a stud, I'll also use a Hilti toggler.. I'd say best estimate so far, thiswill weigh less than 100lbs.

I'm thinking I might try to make one tall block removeable (magnetic?), and driving a screw straight into the wall as a sort of "seismic anti-dislodgement pin", so that in the case of a significant "hop", there will be something beyond just gravity holding it tothe french cleat-style bracket.
 
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.



John Heiss is a YouTube treasure. Did you see his recent sandpaper/table saw video?
 
A magnetically attached block hiding a security screw would be a fine method. I'd be tempted to just drill a deep hole from the top next to the wall down through both halves of the cleats and put a long pin or nail down the hole to just hold things together. at that point you'd have to have a seismic event strong enough to knock it straight upward a distance longer than the pin for it to come apart.

John Heiss is a YouTube treasure. Did you see his recent sandpaper/table saw video?

John's a character. He does whatever the hell he wants and doesn't particularly care what other people think. Most of his videos are quite entertaining, but sometimes his stubbornness in doing things in a way the drags it out and over complicates it annoys me- for example the never ending "I'm going to make the ultimate best ever table saw using plywood and old salvaged parts" series. Seriously, Marius Hornberger bought a table saw that has more functionality than whatever John's 'ultimate table saw" will ever be capable of :-D
 
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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Some progress. After stumbling/struggling with glue last weekend, I got the edge pieces attached. Hoping the glue is strong enough to handle it to hang it above the sofa tomorrow. That will mark the end of project we started January, 2018

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Did some math. We started it 912 days ago.

OK, this is the last post about it, because we completed and hung it up last night. (more pics and some repeated progress photos on imgur below)





And here's just me playing with the Pixaloop app. :p
 
Dude that's stunning. Excellent job.
 
Dude that's stunning. Excellent job.

Thanks!

Want one? Wait time is 3 years, and price is...let's see...$10/hr, for 912 days...is $191,5120 USD. :lol: (yes, i know the math doeesn't really work like that... ;) )
 
Thanks!

Want one? Wait time is 3 years, and price is...let's see...$10/hr, for 912 days...is $191,5120 USD. :lol: (yes, i know the math doeesn't really work like that... ;) )


I do like those, but I want something a bit different.
 
I do like those, but I want something a bit different.

If i were to make it again, i'd probably not cut the tops of any of them on an angle. I also preferred it when it was natural ash befor the stain.
 
What used to be only a 12" deep cabinet with an opening only wide enough for 1 jar of pasta sauce, meaning everything behind it was lost in an abyss...now has a 23"d pull-out can-binet (can cabinet. No? Yeah, it's hard to say, too: "canbinet"...doesn't roll off the tongue).

*I still want to cut slots on the underside of the shelves (which are adjustable, btw) so that they don't slide forward, out of the cabinet. When the unit is pulled out, there's a little side-to-side wobble, so I want to make the shelves "hook" onto the shelf pins. You do that by cutting a partial-depth dado into the underside for the pin to rest in. Right now, it's unfinished. Might give it a wipe-in poly some time, though. We'll see.

The carcass and shelf bottoms is made from leftover "subfloor" plywood from our flooring install, and the walnut fronts in the shelves are actually scraps of out actual flooring.all held together with glue, and a couple brad nails just so that I could un-clamp the glued joints and keep moving. No screws.

Learnings: when using masking tape on a drill bit, after drilling nearly 100 holes, the tape gets pushed up a bit by debris, making every hole slightly deeper than the last. By the time I got to the last of the 96 holes, the hole right at the top, right on the front face, it was enough to blow all the way though. So there's a stupid hole right in the front. I had already installed the pull knob, otherwise I would have re-used that hole for it.

Before we could install it, we had to cut out the back panel of the cabinet. Then, because it's a face frame cabinet, I added a panel on the inside to bring the inside wall flush with the face frame. This eay, the glide would have something to attach to, so that I wouldn't need to use "face frame cabinet drawer slide brackets", which are a HUGE pain, and would have been an even huge pain working with them inside a 9"w cabinet with a 6" opening. Ha! Working inside was super tough...at only 9" wide, I couldn't fit a drill inside to be able to drive the screws. I have a 90° drill adaptor, but you have to be able to use 2 hands, otherwise it just spins. Getting the 2nd arm in there was tough, especially with the screws in the back. This felt a little like trying to build a ship in a bottle.

Amusingly, as we were emptying the cans out of the overhead cabinet to move them down here, we found two things we thought we were out of, and had already added them to our shopping list for this next weekend. Ha!

The drawer glides do stick out the front, unfortunately. I wanted to make sure the glides were strong enough, so we got 150lb-rated ones, and they needed to have an "over-pull" (so it pulls out even further than "full extension"), and I couldn't find those in 22", only 24".

The funny thing is that this area was completely empty when we moved in. The counter top went all the way to the wall, but there was no base cabinet. One day at Lowe's, we saw a clearance slightly damaged 9" wide *overhead* cabinet. We bought it, put legs on it, and wedged it in (with a hammer and a lot of grunting). Now we've butched the cabinet to mount this storage in it. Still find it funny we fit a 23" deep shelf into a 12" deep cabinet. It's like a Tardis, or Charlie Sheen's trailer from Loaded Weapon 1: it's actually bugger inside than it looks on the outside.

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this is the panel I added to the inside, to bring the sode wall flush with the face frame. These holes were meant to line up with the studs in the wall, so I'd be drilling through this material, through the cabinet wall, the slight gap next to the cabinet, the drywall, then finally into the stud. I drilled 3 hiles at each location, because my stud finder isn't totally accurate. I only used one in each trio. Countersunk, so that the screw heads didn't conflict with the drawer glides (I didn't know where those were going yet). This was a piece of scrap material I got from a work project. Yes, it's pretty nice white oak veneer, but it's super thin and just MDF core.
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we'se been using the back as a staining/paint surface. Had to add shims/spacers so that the panel could sit straight both inside and outside the back of the cabinet.
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My "shop":
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Neat.

The cat does not seem amused though.
 
Neat.

The cat does not seem amused though.

Good.

Decided to try to make a "lazy susan" for an awkward corner cabinet. Made my first "good" circle (beyond just drawing one and trying to cut close to the line with a jig a saw.) Made a jig (of sorts) to make this one on the table saw.

It was also my first "panel" glue up. Worked out really nicely. A good, tight joint.

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And, in action:
 
The join is essentially invisible unless you're told it's there, nice job. Big improvement over moving everything and reaching to the back of the cabinet.
 
I have FINALLY got the speaker in the basement to work! :grin:

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Could have gone for a simple Bluetooth speaker, but where’s the challenge in that? So off to eBay for some decades-old B&O gear!

Anyway, I needed a converter box and the right adapter cables. So of course, I first bought the wrong box. After lots of googling, I found out which model was the correct one and fortunately, it was available.

Then, I connected everything and it worked in principle, but the volume from the speaker was never more than a whisper. So I bought a different (two, actually) micro jack to DIN adapter cable, but of course, this didn’t work either.

Lots more googling and reading discussions led me to believe that the pins in the DIN socket in this particular converter box were assigned differently than “normal”. Solution: buy a DIN to 4x RCA/cinch adapter cable, connect a mini jack to 2x RCA/cinch adapter cable to the source and try the RCA connectors one by one. IT WORKS! :mrgreen:
 
Not my design, and I didn't make the tiles, but I installed them yesterday. The trick is that they are all painted with a pretty thick coat, so their dimensions are imperfect, especially in the corners. On a white wall, you wouldn't notice gaps, but you certainly would on a dark wall like this, especially when looking at it straight-on, like you do with this location, at the end of a long corridor.

In the end, I'm very proud of the alignment. Every perimeter edge is damn near perfectly level (more so than the wall itself, anyway), and every non-floating piece could practically be a pressure fit.

Took about 8 hours, including load-in and pack-up, including applying the VHB to the back of each piece. Wish my ladder was 1 step taller. But then it wouldn't have fit in my car very well...

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Tried making a carrier handle helper thing for plywood or other sheet goods. I'm sure I made it wrong and will likely break the first time I use it...but I've needed something *like* it for a long while, and had a scrap of plywood the perfect size. I added a fin on the back so that it could stand on it's own. Figured that could come in handy when shopping for plywood by myself.
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Just finished. 7 hours before my girlfriend is giving them to her clients as "thank you" gifts. Just-in-time order fulfillment, am I right?

First time I've ever made anything like a picture frame, so why not dive in head-first and make it 6-sided to increase the difficulty by 50%. Ha!

I'm not sure what they are supposed to be...coffee table trays for coasters and the remote? A nightstand valet? A dining table centerpiece? A conference table organizer for post-its and a pen cup? Wall art?

Sure, why not.

Full gallery including additional in-progress photos:


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Great work getting the centre to be, y'know, central. I know it's incredibly easy to have a tiny error that just adds up to a big fuck up. Table saw method looks good, still easy to wander off centre after the first cut.
 
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