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  • 2020
    • June
      • Rockin
        06/08/20
        I have a friend that is into everything biking and he came across what they call a rocker plate for a bike trainer. Allows some side to side movement while on the trainer to make it more comfortable and lessen stress on the bike frame. People are selling them online for massive amounts of cash, bu

    • April
      • Dihydrogen Monoxide Recirculator and Reservoir.
        04/27/20
        We have been slowly transforming our backyard, I am pretty sure because we just like wasting money but I keep telling myself it will translate to resale value (yeah right). So what does any backyard need, it needs a hole.



        Turns out there is almost nothing back here except f

    • March
      • Wood
        03/30/20
        Wifey had been bugging me about an accent wall in the bathroom made out of barnwood for a while now. Specifically she found some peel and stick version at Lowes, that looked easy but the price per sqft was way too high.

        Figured if we were going to do this might as well use real barnwood

  • 2019
    • August
      • DOMOTICS
        08/24/19
        I used to play around with the X10 home automation equipment but never really liked it, too finicky, especially connects that had to be on the same phase and noise issues. Well I finally dove into the Samsung Smartthings Hub since it had both Zigbee and Z-Wave antennas and had a good following onli

    • July
      • Breaking wind
        07/11/19
        A couple of weeks ago a storm came threw and the initial gust of wind took down some trees at our house. One of the benefits of living on the top of a plateau.



        This is one of the trees, 3 in all were messed up. These are all Bradford pears trees; they were planted because

    • June
      • Ninja Cube
        06/19/19
        This is my favorite project that I have done since I moved here, so this is a long one. Erin and Z10.0 wanted a playset. We had one of these at our old house and I could see Z outgrowing this thing in less than a year. I looked around for something that I thought would be more age appropriate, bu

    • May
      • Poppin a wheelie
        05/30/19
        Randomly I decided that I wanted to be able to manual a bike, really a wheelie that you don't pedal just use balance, so I built a device out of scrap wood



        so I could practice getting the balance right. Basically, something to stabilize the bike then a strap to stop it

      • A River Runs Through It
        05/19/19
        So we bought this house in the middle of summer and moved in shortly after. First major rain and we started to notice some problems.

        On a medium size rain, we start to see this






        When it rains really hard we get 4-5 inches of water standing next t

    • April
      • Lofty
        04/25/19
        Z10.3 and the wife had been asking for bunk beds for a while. Looking at the cost and what you got I thought I could do something better and cheaper. There is only one Z so the extra beds were not as important as play and work space. So I wanted to build something more like LCA rooms with beds up

      • Supermax Garden
        04/17/19
        So, in the last 10 years since I wrote on this blog I have moved. This has led to a bunch of outdoor projects that I will share.

        The first is our raised bed gardens. We live on a couple of acres in the middle of nowhere, so garden eating invaders are rampant. In order to counteract this

    • March
      • I'm Back
        03/18/19
        Found this a week ago or so. Think I might start up again. This looked like fun. Comment if anyone still reads this

  • 2009
    • August
      • Damn rocks
        08/11/09
        So we had a place in the back of your yard that is tree covered and we could not get grass to grow well. Wife decided that we should make a forestry garden setting in the back and plant low light plants and such. So starts the project for the summer...

        I borrowed a tiller from my boss a

    • June
      • Rain Water
        06/09/09
        I have been meaning to write a blog on my rainwater catching and irrigation system and since I just finished some enhancements I thought now would be a good time.



        I have a 55 gal drum to catch rainwater. It is not nearly enough but tanks are expensive and this was free. I

      • Blender Part 2
        06/05/09
        So for this years canoe trip I decided to remake the gas powered blender project so that it worked without the help of 3 people.



        This is the finished project and I have to say that it worked awesome. I used all junk laying around the house/work to recreate because I am cur

    • April
      • House Repair
        04/17/09
        So I have been pretty busy at work lately and busy at home on the following crap. I noticed some rotting wood on a section of our house, basically the trim around a 2nd floor gutter spout. I also noticed that I was getting a crack in the drywall in that upstairs room. Well I finally got around to

    • February
      • Wood
        02/11/09
        So been a while since I BAB but I have not been doing a whole lot. Winter slows me down since both my garage and my workshop at work are unheated and it gets too cold. The wife also dislikes projects inside the house due to a non-linear building time frame that I employ (time itself stay linear bu

  • 2008
    • December
      • Camera Rig
        12/02/08
        This was a work project but I liked it a lot.

        We take pictures of our plates for record of number and size of samples. I originally started with a cheap nikon L10, the pictures were decent but the auto focus would crap out sometimes and the auto white balance was not consistent, about 1/

    • November
      • Updated Pics
        11/20/08


        Updated pictures should be accessed from the same pictures link below if you want to look. Different Albums now...

      • Baby
        11/16/08


        Baby Zoey Marie
        8lbs 4oz 21.5in long born at 4:16 Friday Nov 15th
        Baby and Mother are doing fine.

        Pictures

      • Makers Faire
        11/05/08
        Have not had a lot of time to do much lately. Wife has me running all over to various appointments or classes or parties but I did take a weekend and go to Austin to the Makers Faire.

        The Makers Faire is setup by Make magazine which is a fairly cool magazine that gives different projec

    • July
      • Sherman Stats
        07/21/08
        I loaded up the cooler with some pre frozen bottles and some bags of ice cubes. I tried to buy some block ice but was thwarted. This is the graph for the back of the truck


        The outside temperature… (Note the time scales do not match)



        My max delta T was 1

      • Sherman
        07/18/08
        Been a while since I BAB but I have been doing stuff so I should have a couple within the next couple weeks.

        This project, hence forth known as Sherman, came from the need to cool the back of my truck. I have a camper on the rear of my mazda b2500 (compact pickup) and we travel with the

    • May
      • Arcade2
        05/05/08
        The arcade is finally finished (Well mostly finished, I ordered some cup holders to put on and it needs to be moved to its final location).

        Its running WindowsXP with MameExtended (.124u4) which is an unofficial build of MAME that has added support for hiscores, filters and artworks. I

    • April
      • moto bike
        04/20/08
        For awhile now I have been looking for a older (70s) enduro motorcycle to putt around on back and forth to work and such (I had one growing up and loved it). Most of the pricing I have found to be higher than I wanted to pay or at the price needed too much work and parts. I had given up on this id

      • Outdoor 2 Update
        04/07/08
        It finally stopped raining long enough to put my arbor in the ground. The rain did make it easier to dig the holes with my new post hole digger.
        It is surprising sturdy, the posts are sunk 1 ft into the ground and have a dirt/dry cement mixture that I refilled the holes with, this will harde

      • Go me
        04/03/08
        I built a baby. Ok I started building a baby, wife is probably going to finish it.

    • March
      • Its alive
        03/30/08
        The CNC machine lives and is operational. I decided to get rid of the die grinder and put on a Rotozip. This way I don't have to use a collect adapter since the Rotozip has a keyless chuck. I also hooked up the V-Clamp (see CNC Update1) and I am using it hold pieces on the worktable. Both

      • Various Outdoors 2
        03/13/08
        So the wife had me busy outside last weekend since it was such nice weather. I built 2 flower boxes in the corners of our property for some hibiscus bushes than my dad gave us. Apparently I am into various geometric shapes, currently I have a pentagon, a rectangle and an attached square (to the re

    • February
      • Mold & Cast
        02/20/08
        I recently found the need to mold and cast something, I needed a gear for this drive mechanism that had broken, I had 3 but needed a 4th.
        Anyways I had seen plaster of Paris molding and know it to be slightly annoying due to originals and parts sticking in the plaster. I have seen some eas

      • Arcade Machine
        02/15/08
        So I started a new project a couple of weeks ago, parts are starting to come in and I currently have all the hardware
        I decided to build an Arcade Machine. If you have ever looked at PC Arcade games before you know there are emulators out there that allow you to play older arcade games. Th

    • January
      • Pictures update
        01/29/08
        So my picture frame / wireless laptop thing is working great but I decided that I did not want the screen up all the time because of burn in issues. I ended up with a wireless USB trackball that I can hit a button on and take power saving off on the laptop whenever I want. I was looking for the sm

  • 2007
    • December
      • Pictures
        12/21/07
        Yeah, Yeah I know it was been a while but I am back.

        My latest project is fairly simple. I created a webpage on our intranet at work to check the status of all our instruments. They are updated in real-time so you can look at the page and if the instrument needs attention it turns yello

    • September
      • Various House 2
        09/11/07
        I was looking over this blog and saw that I was definitely behind on house projects being updated to the blog. So lets see what I/Wife has been doing lately.

        First off is the retaining wall which is complete and planted. It took 5 yards of dirt and 3 yards of mulch, one load at a time i

      • Excuses
        09/06/07
        Alright, so I have not done any projects recently but I have excuses, lots of them.
        First off it has been way too hot to do anything productive, we had two weeks where the temps were 102-106. There is no air conditioning in my garage nor in my work's shop area. The pool was even up to 9

    • June
      • Various House Projects
        06/13/07
        I have found it hard to really get to any projects lately. I think my main problem is this sitting in my back yard. It just seems hard to get up the energy to remove myself from the pool. Oh well.

        Projects around the house though are pushed through by my overeager wife so I have made so

      • Blend a little
        06/01/07
        Well Canoe Trip 2k7 went well although I was a little disappointed with the gas powered blender. I think I tried to make it do too much. I should have left off the propeller device and stuck to the main goal of heavy drinking. I had routed out the wood to hold the propeller support stationary; li

    • May
      • Vroom..Blend..Kaboom
        05/23/07
        Catastrophic failure of propulsion device happened today during water stress testing. (Blending device still intact)

        I had stepped up the size of the prop because I thought last years device needed a larger propeller. When the prop was inserted into the water the small 1" piece of

      • Vroom...Blend...Vroom..
        05/22/07
        It's Alive. If not a little ghetto looking.

        After a few iterations of the drive shaft, I got it working without tearing itself apart and flinging parts everywhere. Actually it eats ice like crazy now.

        I found that the featherlite weedeater does not contain any type of clut

      • Darts
        05/11/07
        Occasionally I get bored at work. I happened to have this 3” neodymium donut magnet (it was supposed to be used to manually open a solenoid valve on our water system if the electric mechanism ever went dead. It works but is completely unneeded). It has been used in various stupid tricks and was m

      • Vroom...Vroom...
        05/10/07
        So big canoe trip going on at the end of the month and I usually like to take some random thing along that I have built. Last year I made a small electric power outboard from PVC. It worked but not well, I think I needed a larger propeller.
        Anyways an idea was brought up this year for a gas p

    • April
      • Fridge/Oven/Peltiers that bean said would not work
        04/17/07
        So I finally got the components for making my peltier fridge. Both items I got off of ebay extremely cheap, the heat sinks are from Pentium3 coolers and the peltiers are from who knows what. There is a picture of the items here.
        Now I also have a picture of the Liconic robotic oven in questio

    • March
      • CNC Update1
        03/30/07
        Well I made some progress on my CNC machine the other day. I got the spindle mounted to the Z axis. It actually a die grinder. , spins at 30000rpm has some crazy power. I was cutting though some steel with a 3 in circular blade on it and it was just eating it up. I have a more limited Z axis th

      • Engine
        03/22/07
        I have a 4hp gasoline lawn mower engine (runs good) that I need a project for. Suggestions?

      • Fridge problems
        03/20/07
        Just a quick post. Note to self, forget about taking apart normal fridge for use.

        Apparently the makers of fridges do do want you to tear them apart. I opened the bottom no problem, Compressor is now only attached by the copper line that goes to the coils. Now I can't cut the lin

      • Flame tube
        03/16/07
        okay so number 2 was the custom 8 ball but I don't have any pictures for that yet. So the Flame tube music player is basically a real life frequency graph. I am not really doing anything different with this one just using it for nice visuals.
        Basically you take a pipe drill some holes s

      • CNC
        03/13/07
        Okay some of you may have seen a picture of my old version. It worked, I cut some wood, some aluminum, and acrylic but it lacked stability. The cutouts at the front caused the frame to flex under high stress and/or speed causing my cuts to be out of line.
        I just happened to have laying arou

      • Monstrosities
        03/10/07
        Alright, I started this blog for a running tally/list of my build projects. It seems that I am always working on one thing on the other. My list seems to be ever growing since I don’t like to finish things. Currently on the list are:

        1. CNC Machine (rebuild)
        2. Custom Magic Eight

      • HA
        03/08/07
        I have a blog. Take that bitches. I am still trying to figure out how to work this damn thing. I get some more content later.