crazy sist kept seeing funny critters in the boards’ patterns ;) we aren’t a family of artists for nothing!

I made the stairs in blocks of two, using the grain direction to add extreme strength where I needed it to be and keep the vertical walls/supports to a useful minimum. The steps are 20 cm deep each, and once the dados and endgrain supporting portions are taken out we remain with ~35 cm wide cabinets for the shelves, which has proved to be perfect. I used glue, screws and dowels to secure each pair of steps to the connecting things which name I don’t know in EN (“contre-marche” en français, baby)

You can see that all the horizontal rails are supported on the endgrain of the vertical separators. Those are heavily screwed in place and don’t move at all.

This last picture shows the last two steps, which form a 90 degree angle to the right while keeping a 60 cm wide step size. This block will also be used to hold the ventilation system and the control computer (I’ll use one of our old laptops with a USB sensors and control board). The staircase is installed in the left side of the basement, and the right side wall is fitted with wooden shelves with plywood backing boards, and to prevent moisture from developping I installed computer fans between the wall and the backs to move the air, and it works great.

Here you can see all the finished parts ready to be installed in their home. I’ll take pictures of the finished basement this summer when going back there.

TBC!

First order of business: enlarge the basement opening, too small for anything else than a ladder, there’s just no way that I let mom go up and down a ladder carrying anything. It took us three full days to get to the point were we had a full opening, first day I drilled through the concrete to prepare for the heavy destruction (I considered using explosives at one point – no kidding, this thing is really rock-solid) and then it was a matter of using the big boys toy and destroy it all. The holes I had made on the first day really helped keep things under control and we managed to get the armed concrete to break exactly as we wanted it to.

You can definitely tell we had a blast here… well, not quite, but at last we got the job done. By the way, how do you get a 20+ kilogram (~40 pounds) electric hammer in there and use it against an horizontal concrete slab without too much effort? by hanging it to the upper stairs of course (with the strong nylon flat rope I use to pull out stumps with mom’s ride :D). We had no effort to do to keep it where it should be and completed the actual dismantling in around an hour.

Secondly, we made a nice mold to tidy up the opening (which will be encased with wood eventually).
This is where you can definitely say: there is no such thing as scrap wood. I used polystyrene blocks to fill the gaps and wood spacers to keep the mould from touching the sides and preventing us from putting the cement where we needed it.

Gotta love daddy’s looks in his heavy duty outfit ;)

Next we coated the walls with a stone-colored, erm, construction stuff which name I don’t know in english (“enduit” in Froggish). I had dad buy a real compressor and projecting device for that – and later told him about the pneumatic nailers and the possibility to hack it into an air pump to build a vacuum press, which idea really got him excited. I made the most out of my free Facom baseball cap and managed to get very little sand in my huge metalhead hair ;) These compressed air projecting devices can really make a mess in no time. I couldn’t get decent pictures of that part of the process but imagine a nice warm yellowish stone colored wall in a basement and you get the idea of what we ended up with.

I’ll split this post here and continue with the staircase construction in part two.

I like it so much that after a while I thought: F*k it, I’m gonna hack my bandsaw and DP and install fixed flexible light fittings on each one. And they happen to stock them where I work. Greatness in the workshop sometimes lies in small details. Hope it can inspire others ;)

So for that steampunk clock I’ll be building for my father I need decorative props. Quickslap-style analog dials are okay for the others, but not for me: I want it to be the real thing. So how can you get your hands onto a working 25mm OD analog dial? Well, probably by huge luck, but if I can picture it, I can build it.

I didn’t shoot the whole process, as this is a preliminary prototype (which works). Just posted it on instructables to see if it gets any attention.

It’s entirely made from homemade cardboard (printer paper + thin CA glue), plus a glass dome bought on ebay (like $3 for 6 of them, free postage), 0,05mm enameled copper wire (don’t remember but for the 7,5 m needed for this it’s less than 1€ worth of wire), a small section of 0,8 mm brass rod, two small rare-earth magnets (from Supermagnetman’s website).

And time. Lots of time. At this stage I have around 3 hours in it, give or take, which involved building the winding jigs and devising the proper building methods. Here are the pictures and a video of the thingie in action. Hope this will tinker the Steam Punk in you ;)

Look, it’s moving!

A contest has been running at my university since January 7th. Neat subject: “Retro future”, the future seen from yesteryear. Well the bait got me and so I decided to enter it (hey there’s an iPad [mini,alas] and a few other goodies to be won!).

So my idea was to mix up things from different time periods and make it look like a 30s advertisement.

I had been saving four 50s Nixie display tubes to make a clock for my father (work in progress which will be posted here), add a few other things as references to my family and university, and so I needed a clock face, oak preferably.

So this is where the woodworking comes in: cue a slice of white oak from a pallet from my old urban wood gloats, and there we are. I had planed this board after resawing to 3mm thick a few years ago with several others and had been keeping those in my bathroom, in case I needed to build small boxes out of solids.

After printing the face drawing, I routed out the four holes for the Nixie tubes, attached small aluminium brackets with CA glue, and the woodworking part was done at this point. Here is the face:

Next was a matter of putting the whole thing together on my table:

making sure that the tell tale stuff wasn’t visible in the final picture, light the Nixies, shoot several frames, tweak it, shoot again

add the text and effects in Photoshop, and there you have it:

You can see it in its full glory in my flickr stream right here.

Hope you enjoy :)

So this baby here needed a new handle, the plastic ones being designed to not last. Even though this is a cheap 4€ pancake pan, and that the liner is chipping out, it’s okay, because I use it for melting rocket candy. So it’s getting fixed.

First order or business, grab some nice colored palletwood from my old urban gloats (these will last me for years here). Draw the overall dimensions of the handle…

... then take out the (cheap) wood saw and cut it out…

... and there’s the handle blank. Some sanding on the edges and on the leftover stock, and we can move forward.

By the way, you know it’s high time to change your sanding block’s diaper when it starts to look like this ;)

Here I’m lining up the end of the block to the ferule of the pan to get the profile, which I draw from both inside and outside:

Now cue the carving tool. As I don’t have a carving knife, I thought it was a good time to use the knife my father bought me years ago in French Guyana, when they lived there. Lookit this thing, all hand made by a local craftsman, blade and all (he only had them laser engraved afterwards):

Gotta tell ya I love this snakewood handle.

Now back to business. I rough out the shape of the handle with the knife, with several re-sharpenings on a 600 grit with cutting oil (those blades he used weren’t made for wood but for meat, so it dulls quickly with what looks like beech to me).

From that point on it was difficult to get pictures on my own. I took out the Dremel (with its brand new rotor!), and hollowed out the mounting recess with an HSS end cutting tool.
Then I got the big drill out, put the flat sanding disk on, and shaped the handle with 80 grit, keeping the vacuum next to the wood to get any dust. Works quite well.

And this is how it came out after a few minutes of shaping:

Then it was only a matter of fine-tuning the mounting side, routing out a bit more with the Dremel, test-fit, repeat.

Once the loose fit was good, a single coat of sun-bleached linseed oil (fine painter’s grade… yeah blatant overkill):

and finally crimping the handle into place:

Thus relives my small pan! Definitely longer to document and blog about than to do.

^^

This is the model I started with, changing it to account for the thickness of my leather: no outer rims, no liner :)

http://sewmamasew.com/blog2/2010/08/back-to-school-pencil-case/

Well that happened in the start of this month, in the course of two days (4 hours in all, more or less) I made it. All hand sewn (this leather was way too thick for the sewing machine), which explains the time it took me. Total cost: around 4€. The most expensive was the zipper.

I also made several pairs of shoes for my sweetheart with hand sewn leather and repurposed wooden soles. Will blog on that later.

One of my projects is to devise a method and the necesary jigs to make the (heeled) soles myself to lower my costs and provide her with a perfect fit every time (and be able to stuff her shoes closet up to the ceiling hahaha!). Holidays are meant for that :)

777 days and $57 later, this is where I am now. Buying expensive drill bits.
And I’m loving it!

The guilty one concerning the purchase of this monster 3 1/4” Forstner bit is Al, aka Boxguy, because of this .
He made me realize that jewelry drawers can be as simple as a round hole in a wood chunk, which made me redesign a part of one of the jewelry boxes I’m currently working on. Hence this monster wood hogger.

Yes, it’s a cheap chinese version, but a $500 American Forstner drill was out of question, as I don’t plan on making any money building jewelry boxes. But with some careful drillpress usage, I’m certain I can get some decent holes out of this thing.

I will post a review once I’ll have some time to check it out.

TTYL.

Close-up of the top wheel support opening for the wheel orientation and blade tensioning mechanisms:

And the two wheels in place:

When hand-turning it to align the wheels I realized that my blade is warped in a spot, which makes it jump out of the wheels. Oh, well, anyway, I will recut and resolder an older blade from my shop bandsaw next time i go to the parents’.

I also received four pancake servomotors as the one I used on my homemade pen lathe, of the whisper-quiet kind, and they already have the pulley for the size of timing belts I use for these homemade powertools. So this will be very handy when installing the motor on the bandsaw!

I will still have to round the angles and add the front cover over the wheels, paint it, try it out, and cut pen blanks and bent lamination strips with it!

Plus plastic lock lever:

Equals a lot of frustration. This thing wears out so quick that it started playing me tricks after the first 10 uses or so.

Having two of these, one here and one at the parents’, I took benefit of spending my holidays at their place to quickly mill two replacement levers, out of steel bar. I brought one home and finished it this afternoon:

I like the fact that these entry level routers have a pretty decent dust extraction port:

plus they pack a very decent amount of power, and can run up to 34K rpm without any vibration.
Having to finish The Teacher’s pencil box #1 before school actually starts over, I needed to fix the router so it wouldn’t play tricks on me while milling the already cut MDF parts I had prepared at my countryside shop.

Doesn’t look good, but definately does the job. No more play when locking the router, and a firm locking. Oh, the spring remained there, but I don’t see any practical use to having a spring there anyway.

So far so good, no more mixed feelings about the entry level router after fixing this first issue. Next one: the power button, to be replaced by a toggle switch and add a foot pedal option. All for under 4 €, thanks chinese eBay peeps!

And once it’s empty there are a few goodies to look for inside the pumps of these things:

The hard plastic balls are very nice and shiny (not as in this picture, I stuffed it in a hole in my tabletop so it wouldn’t move during the picture). I collect them for fun and maybe someday I will have enough to make a bracelet for my girlfriend ;)

The stainless steel spring in these things is of good interest to me. I have a decent collection of hardware parts scavenged from all the electronic items I dismantled over the years (and I began it early). Mainly printers and photocopiers. In this case I was searching through my compression springs collection for a pair that would be around 1 cm long and with enough strength to be used for the freewheel of the small bandsaw I’m building. It turns out that I used one of the springs from my dismantled soapo dispenserz. Kthx.

And so the story continues: meet my little friend Tom (Sawyer):

This is the freewheel, with its support and adjusting caddy. The bolt allows for tensioning of the blade, and the set screws for sideways orientation of the wheel. The whole assembly will be attached to the body via hinges, to allow for the vertical plane orientation, and I will also be using one of the soap dispenser springs for it.

Here you can see the face of the wheel. It’s MDF, hollowed to lighten it up a bit and allow for manual rotation. I know, Matthias Wandel tested it and concluded that MDF is not a great material for a bandsaw wheel, but as this will be a very small scale one with no need for speed, I prefer to have a really homogenous pair of wheels as I will use it mainly for veneer slicing and pen blanks roughing.

Here you can see the two spring halves used for the push action against the wheel mount. Pull action is via a pair of hex screws, fitted with threaded inserts. The wood for these parts is decent quality pine and some plywood, as MDF would not react properly to threaded inserts anyway.

This is the power wheel, hollowed as the freewheel to gain some weight, add it some sexiness and a few grip points to turn it by hand. It will be driven via a timing belt, just like my pen lathe.

And here the face view. I haven’t erased the pencil lines yet.

Hopefully I will be able to finish the bandsaw rather soon now, as the tools I needed to build these parts were at my parents’ place. Expect a few updates and a finished project post in the coming weeks.
Alas, time was too short to even start the prototype cord reel. Later.

Cheers!

Full size here.

The overall dimensions are 11” height and 13 3/4” outer diameter.

Bill of Materials:
- plywood: TBD, scraps could do if you can make segmented turnings, outer shell can be a pyramid or a cone
- motor: $10
- power supply unit: $10
- Lazy Susan bearings: $4.50 plus postage (or get them at your local DYI store)
- misc electric stuff: depending on the command mode. If RC, add around $20.
- add the cord of course :)

so far, for the motorized function, we’re around $40 give or take.

Time wise, I’ll have to actually build it to be able to give a decent value, but this part will depend on the technique chosen for the cylinders (bent lamination of cheap veneer, segmented plywood turning, or even a mere octagon or other high facet count thing).

Now to end packing up for the 10 hour road trip tomorrow… TTYL

Bottomline: If Matthias Wandel didn’t do it already, I’ll do it before he even thinks about it! =p

First order of business was to code a little software to make all the math with a pretty user interface, sliders and realtime graphics. Yay, I’m a computer geek too, so what the heck. With the software, playing with the parameters is a piece of cake to avoid potential problems (stacking of the cable when rewinding, etc)

In fact, the same system can be used for air tubing, and after seeing the prices of commercial units, I can sure make it for cheaper. I can even make it out of aluminium. But wood is better for the ecosystem.

So for this project to be, the data will be as follows:

Ceiling-mounted motorized electric cord reel

- holds 25’ / 7 m of 3/4’ (000AWG) / 10 mm tri-conductor power cable
- overall diameter: about 10” / 25 cm
- overall height (including exit cone): around 8” / 20 cm
- motorized function with either an RF remote control or a pull cord
- optional lights
- outer shape can be made pyramidal or conical, or even hemispherical and heavily inlaid with… whatever
- easy and cheap materials (plywood, small lazy susan bearing, $10 geared motor, $10 power supply with plenty of leftover power for overhead LED lights, a few plastic rollers from any DYI store)
- no need for fancy tools: printer (for the gear templates), bandsaw and circle cutting jig (or 3D printer if you have access to one), drill and bits, screws and screwdriver, minimal ability to read wiring instructions, can accomodate a beer or two
- one-weekend project or less.

Stay tuned for the prototype plan!

http://youtu.be/dAd0fJpKcWw

Edit: I added a forum topic here to discuss the numbers and options for those interested in that potential shop project.

These chunks of mushroom flesh (completely dry) are from Fomes Fomentarius, the evil tinder conk, that loves birch to death, literally.

Being a scientific mind in a demented body, I of course cut down a rather big Fomes fruiting body into chunks (secret project) and brought them back to Paris with me. Right now I’m sorting things out here, many will go back to the parents’ house, in my shop (or the opposite, maybe).

Sorting and reorganizing my wood I checked out the little cardboard box into which said Fomes pieces were. To my surprise, dusty worm poop came out of it.

Okay so I’ve got some kind of infestation there! Grab a takeaway japanese food plastic container (Mads would yell at me if I called those boxes “bento-to-go”), cue the camera, bring out the big lights, and run it full screen to check out the suckers.

Tiniest. Bugs. Ever. Two to three millimeters. Chewing up one of the most agressive wood chewing fungi.

Wow, I should have filmed that actually. Anyway here are the crappy $0.99 ebay webcam (free postage) pixes I just took. Enjoy!

Cheers

Enjoy ;)

On the “fast & furious” series, I had some nice time with the parents at our countryside home, and grabbed a mahogany cutoff in one of them bins, cut it to size and brought it back home (along with some goodies for someone here that will recognize himself ;)

Just attached it to the pen lathe (drill press helped drill and countersink the holes), the previous part was a crappy plywood chunk which edge was quite worn off, resulting in less than linear motion for the chisels! This will help things a lot. Next up, add a circlip to the mandrel to avoid lateral movement and vibrations!

Cheers!

So, to sum it up, this is Chlorociboria, a.k.a. “the mean tiny hulk”:

Making nice things to the wood it lives into (right)

because of this pigment, the xylindein:

Which response to light in the visible spectrum looks like this:

And whose picture I was (almost certainly) the first to ever take with a Scanning Tunelling Microscope.
Say hello to my little friend:

Now how cool is that? :)

I don’t remember if I told you peeps about this one. Last summer I took home the biggest left chunk of a very old plum tree we used to play at when kids in my village, the new owner of the land having decided that it was too “tired” and had to go, he cut it down five years ago. I had taken home several big branches, which have wonderful color zones, but that big crotch sitting in the open was crying at me. So last summer I set up a night mission and brought it home. I’l tell ya, moving a 300 lb crotch with only a two-wheeled cart is, well, quite a manly experience. And wow, does it take up floor space under my workbench… lookit the beast:

24” in all dimensions. The big chunk at the front (from which I cut a first sample) came from just under the big crotch. It’s 8” thick, lightly spalted, full of burl, and has wonderful purple lines. I’ll show you a pen that I’ll turn out of some of it once I’ll have received my carbide inserts (no more turning with chisels!). If it’s nice enough, I might as well end up listing some of that ~100+ year old plum burl on eBay.

See you!