Even with a foam muffler on my Shop Vac, (‘Vac available from Amazon) it was still louder than I wanted without hearing protection. I tried putting a piece of acrylic over the front of it, but when I had a few pieces of scrap wood available I decided to box in two of the sides as shown in the photos below. I attached scrap packaging material to the inside of them to act as noise-insulation.
I could probably box it in even more, Read more »
“Darticus”, two wooden plant vases, and 2 “electro-wooden” mushroom models safely packed away
Several of my wooden creations were recently displayed, and I wanted a way to get them in and out of the event without damage. The wooden plant pots were especially vulnerable as they had dirt in them.
To keep everything upright, I turned to my trusty Zen Toolworks / DIY (my setup) foam cutter. With this cutter, I made a foam piece to fit the bottom of a pistol range bag (I think this is the model from Amazon) into something that could hold these pieces securely.
I had a roughly 1 inch thick piece of foam left over from a delivery. The circular pieces I marked with hole saws of a roughly appropriate size and cut it out. The square base for my dart holder was cut using masking tape as a guide. Check out the slideshow after the “read more” for more pictures of this build. Read more »
Like many things in life, there’s a great difference in what you can pay for a similar item. A quick search for penlights on Amazon gives a range from around $1.50 each with shipping to around $20. The Coast HP3, also available from Amazon, is $32.47 as of this writing.
Based on price alone, you might be a little skeptical of this light, but the reviews on Amazon give it a full 5 stars, with a few people giving it “only” a 4. I generally don’t write about work on this blog, but using a flashlight isn’t exactly a trade secret, and after a very grueling preventive maintenance operation as an engineer, I can say that I had, by far, the best light.
Other small/pen lights didn’t compare in brightness while snaking around the machine to tighten obscure bolts, and the fact that the beam could be focused to a point or to a wide angle was really helpful. At a wide angle, the light could be put down and set to shine on a piece of equipment, freeing up my hands for other tasks. If there’s one drawback to this light, Read more »
I’ve used Rockler clamps to hold down my CNC router workpieces for quite some time, (see my original setup/howto) but recently discovered that there is a miniature version of these clamps available.
Below are links to what you’ll need for this setup from Amazon – Rockler throws in free shipping on orders over $25 there, possibly on their site as well, not sure. If you want to set up a clamp table as I did, I’d recommend getting some combination of the following:
These were used on a 7×12 Zen Toolworks router, which can also be purchased off of Amazon. My model is a bit older, and doesn’t have the taller “3D” gantry – I’ve written a ton about it and projects done with it in my CNC section.
If money was no object, Read more »
Those of you that read this blog know that my talents (and education) skews to the mechanical side of “hacking” or “making.” Given that the IO for many of my projects is fairly simple, the ATtiny could be an ideal programming platform. This little chip is available from Sparkfun, for under $3.00, or for less if purchased in bulk (Ebay has some). Although it only has 5 (or possibly 6) IO pins, this little chip is incredibly small, and with such a low cost can easily be left on a project.
Once I got it, I intended to use an Arduino Uno (my review) that I had available to program this board. To test it out, the “blink” sketch was used as shown in this MIT tutorial. This is also shown via video in this tutorial by Make’s Matt Richardson. The information should be the same in each, but when I tried this, it gave me some sort of “USB not found error.”
The trick to fixing this was actually pretty simple. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m running Ubuntu Linux,** Read more »
