The "i made dis" thread

Well, it works, but it’s way too high up, my legs dangle.

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Well, it works, but it’s way too high up, my legs dangle.

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Chairs cylinders are sort of a commodity part, similar to casters. Only a few factories make almost all of the task chair gas cylinders in the world. You might be able to find a shorter cylinder that fits your chair on Amazon. your chair proooobably came with a 5"-travel cylinder, and you might be able to find a 3" that fits. The chair maker might even offer one, if they have any sort of real presence/distribution in the US.
 
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Since I refuse to spend 70e on one of these on Etsy, I decided to break out my dads 1960s jigsaw! Also fitted a 3-way-dimmable bulb (it cycles intensity by switching off and back on quickly), so this can be a only-sorta-creepy night light ?
 
Don't have a cow, man!

Now you need an upgraded version that uses a small motor and levers to nod the head and wiggle the ears continuously. Because reasons.
 
When you need to hold something down, and there's no such thing as a "floor clamp":

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The last parts for our home remodel (which included all new floors) were the thresholds between the different flooring, and the back door. 2 of the 5 were from a piece of pre-made "T" walnut, but 3 of them I had to mill and shape myself from a single 8/4 plank of walnut.

None of the doorways were perfect, so they are all parallelograms, two needed notches, etc. Normally with new construction you'd under-cut the door frames, and then box them in with the trim, but that wouldn't have worked here, and didn't want to risk ruining the floors we worked so hard on.

Here's them finished, and installed. The one that looks like it's a dofferent color: it is. This was going to be a very high traffic piece, and needed a finish that was super durable AND easy to repair, and it just didn't color the wood as much as we would have liked it to...so note: Minwax hard wax oil doesn't darken/yellow wood like most oil finishes do...

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It took a while to finish these. I cut myself with my table saw making them, and it took a while to be able to use it calmly, mostly because I still had to complete that same cut that gave me stitches in my finger.

We also glued them down, because we didn't want any visible nail holes to fill. We filled a lot of holes in this floor with different types of wood filler, and can see every one, and didn't want that for these solid wood threshold pieces.

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Girlfriend has been selling her concrete pots at pop-up street fairs, and needed a way to tier the display, so the pots would be easier to see without stacking them.

She's been using plywood pieces with stacked bricks as the risers....but that meant carrying loose bricks back and forth from her car when setting up her display.

So i made some legs for the plywood shelf pieces. Made out of scrap subfloor plywood and 2x4s left over from our home remodel, so as not to spend any money on materials. I also had to make sure I could finish them between my sudden-onset IBS issues, so they ain't fancy.. ?

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Note: this is not a construction method i would recommend. Ha!
 
I bought a new USB powered clock to go beside my bed, one I can see without glasses, but I find them distracting when I'm trying to get to sleep. I wanted a way to switch it on and off on a timer, but without taking up a socket with a traditional plug timer and its loud relay.

I picked up a remote controlled switching circuit for up to 12V, one with a remote that has a funny telescopic antenna. First part of the plan was to make a receiver board to handle the USB power control. USB-B in because I have lots of spare cables and USB-A out for the clock. These USB breakout boards were being sold in packs of 10 on Amazon for a very good price, with prime delivery.



Second part of the plan was to integrate an Arduino clone into the transmitter so I can control the on/off via my server. Yes, this could be done with home automation like Alexa but I don't have those and don't really want them. I programmed the Arduino to respond to serial data from the PC, then made up a little board with a couple of optocouplers to isolate the Arduino circuitry from the 9V circuitry in the remote. This was stuck to the back of the original remote board with VHB, fortunately the case had enough space.



The wires from the optocouplers were ran around and tagged onto the microswitches, they will bridge the connection when the optocoupler is triggered. The USB port on the Arduino was reinforced with extra solder because they're quite flimsy, the final unit is actually the second one because I broke the first. Thankfully they're cheap and plentiful.



A hole was cut for the USB mini cable (eventually made large enough after breaking that first Arduino board) and everything shoved back in the case. The remote still works as it did originally but when connected to a PC there's a green glow from the board inside. Commands are sent via Powershell, in exactly the same way as my button box.



It works great and the relay on the receiver is much quieter than the normal plug timer relays. it's set to turn off at 10pm and turn on at 4am. The 9V battery should last a really long time, if not I'll just put a booster board in and run that from USB power too. The only slight annoying thing is that the transmitter signal is picked up by my audio cables, going to experiment with placement.
 
Girlfriend has been selling her concrete pots at pop-up street fairs, and needed a way to tier the display, so the pots would be easier to see without stacking them.

She's been using plywood pieces with stacked bricks as the risers....but that meant carrying loose bricks back and forth from her car when setting up her display.

So i made some legs for the plywood shelf pieces. Made out of scrap subfloor plywood and 2x4s left over from our home remodel, so as not to spend any money on materials. I also had to make sure I could finish them between my sudden-onset IBS issues, so they ain't fancy.. ?

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Note: this is not a construction method i would recommend. Ha!
Her craft fair sales have been doing pretty well, and she decided she needed an additional tier, and some extra width. The tiers also needed to be flat-pack and assemble without tools/fasteners, and lighter than those previous risers.

So...viola.

There are many designs for shelves like this, but so many have two separate rear kickstand legs, which do nothing to prevent racking and seem quite wobbly. This solid back panel makes it super stable; zero woble or racking. Worth the extra size/weight.

Each shelf is 48" wide, 7" deep, and they are set at 5"h, 9.5"h and 14"h.

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I also made a sign that attaches to the top of a taller free-standing folding shelving. It also attaches without tools or fasteners. The cutout vinyl logo was fabricated by a commercial signage shop based on our design though...neither of us could paint that well. Plywood, cut out 3m vinyl, with 2 coats of polycrylic.
 

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Time for more electronics jiggery pokery. I've fancied a Makita-based variable DC power supply for a while after seeing this Tom Sachs contraption that was sent to AvE:


Mainly I always thought that I could do a neater job myself, having to adjust the voltage through a crude hole in the front panel irritated me. The DML186 lamp that this is based on hasn't been the cheapest thing to get hold of, however I saw a seller on eBay offering it new for just over a tenner so I snapped it up along with the required components to make this overpriced gadget.

The board is an LM2596S based DC-DC step down voltage regulator that will provide up to 17.5V in my application and a couple of amps, should be fine for my use but if it catches fire I'll know I pushed it too far. Naturally, I wanted easy control so I needed to swap the onboard 10K pot for a big one I could mount on the outside. I also didn't like the idea of it always being on so I dug out a toggle switch.

The internals are actually quite neat with several plugs, spade and ring connectors used so I can strip everything apart fairly easily. I didn't take any photos though and getting it together was an exercise in carefully pushing so that everything found a home without breaking.

Toggle switch replaces the push button, didn't trust that little thing to handle the extra power this might see


Binding posts/banana plug sockets and the shiny voltage control knob. It's fairly coarse with the entire 17.5V sweep over that small distance. Markings are quite accurate if not particularly easy to read.


Croc clips or other leads plug in nicely.
 
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I made a doodad. It sends key commands, that's all it does. I'm proud of how neat it is.



I didn't want to have a micro Arduino board just sitting around where it could be shorted, so I stole the toggle switch from something else and it all fitted in one of these cheap cases really neatly. Uses the magnetic connectors I've been banging on about for years, the fact that they can carry data is brilliant.
 
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


Haven't been able to work on anything, due to on-going health issue, but I did finally mount a couple of sconces next to that wood wall art piece, and took a random picture that I thought looked kind of neat.

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Also, hung a small art print to the right. 😅 Mom isn't a fan.

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I made this in 2019, It took a while, my wife was getting stressed. The room is only 2m x 3.2m


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I did the desks and "towers" in July, then the "Bridge" in October while she was away :), you can see why she was stressed.

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Unfortunately I didn't take many photos during construction, but you get the idea.

Before I started, I got a quote from a local company to make it and fit it, but they wanted about 4000 Euros.

So I did it myself, it cost me about 850 Euros including some tools, fittings, materials, etc. It is the first thing I have ever made like this and I'm pretty happy with the result. My desk is between the towers, while my wife gets the window.

The end product is a little different than the drawing, but it is close, I decided to use a different colour for the working spaces to make a bit of a highlight. I did the desks first, none of the supporting sructures are touching the wooden floor, they all have feet. The desks look like they are floating, but have enough support underneath that I could walk from end to end on top while fitting the top parts.

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There are horizontal strips screwed into the walls then the desks are held in place by dowels.

The "towers" were made separately then just sat on top of the desks and screwed into the wall, again with dowels for stability.

The "Bridge" is a separate part, through bolted to the sides of the towers and with 2 supports in the middle holes. The vertical parts are held with cam-lock screws like in ikea stuff, but more of a pain in the arse when you have to drill all the holes yourself.

All the material was bought from a local DIY type place, they can cut everything to size for you, so that saved a lot of work (except when I measured wrong, or they cut too small)

The curves on the shelves I did myself then trimmed with heat applied strips to finish them off. I also reduced the width of the inner parts to open the space up a bit. I never got round to doing the 2 radii (!) on the desks, I don't have any tool that would do them nicely and it would be expensive if I fucked them up, so I just left them square, bit more space though, so that's OK.

Heres a photo of the finished article, now filled with the normal crap that seems to fill any empty space in our apartment.

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After recording a video about the new audio mixer I have on my desk, I set about tracing the source of some buzzing. It was my USB DAC, so I switched to optical and the noise is gone. Anyway, the DAC has a 3-way switch for selecting between USB, optical and coax and I wanted to blank off the USB option and make it essentially an on/off switch.

I had some top plates from old hard drives lying around, one had a piece of steel inlayed into the pressed stainless top. I peeled it off, cut it to shape to fit the front of the DAC and then filed it until it just stopped the switch from being moved into the top position.

I painted it was a black paint marker and heated it with a little micro blowtorch, I was hoping it would make it go dull bit it actually caused it to have a crinkled finish, which matches quite well with the case and anodised aluminium. It needed longer M3 screws but I keep a stock of those so that was easy.



 
After recording a video about the new audio mixer I have on my desk, I set about tracing the source of some buzzing. It was my USB DAC, so I switched to optical and the noise is gone. Anyway, the DAC has a 3-way switch for selecting between USB, optical and coax and I wanted to blank off the USB option and make it essentially an on/off switch.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_90uFCrWWY
 
I paint miniatures for tabletop games as a creative outlet. Here's one of my most recent projects where I just wanted to have some fun with the colors I used.

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And here's something from a little while ago, custom designed and 3D printed (through HeroForge.com) minis. They're characters of a friend and mine from a P&P RPG campaign (Shadowrun) that we met through a couple years back, and I painted one set (of the two) for him as a gift and one for myself. So these were me trying my absolute best.

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Supposing I get the setup right and the broken bowl I hope to use for practice doesn’t shatter straight away, what sort of lubricant/coolant should I use for drilling into glass? I know there are oils for this, but not which ones are crap.
 
I think running water would probably be fine for glass, keeping it cool and the 'shavings' away. That's what you're really doing when drilling glass, grinding or shaving it away. I suppose I should ask - do you have proper glass drills? Standard twist drills won't work.

Edit: Oh I keep forgetting to comment on those amazing paint jobs @shad_68, I can't really get my head around painting like that. Those prints look like powder bath prints due to the texture on them.
 
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