How To Make A Sewing Room Cutting Table

Description

In this episode of the House of Hacks, Harley takes you on the journey from idea to finished product to show how to make a sewing room cutting table.

You might also like the video How to Make a Sewing Table

Sign up for a 30-day free Audible trial and get 2 books that are yours to keep, even if you don’t continue past the trial. (Affiliate link)
The Art of War by Steven Pressfield (Affiliate link)
Atomic Habits by James Clear (Affiliate link)

About

Stay connected with what's happening here at the House of Hacks by signing up for our newsletter

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How To Make A Sewing Room Cutting Table

Here's a list of the tools I use.

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"

Contents

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:01 Overall design
• 2:10 Initial Construction
• 2:55 Resistance
• 4:29 Habits to overcome Resistance
• 5:14 Final Construction
• 5:50 Finished product

Transcript

Introduction

I have had that cutting table top for more than 20 years since before we moved here. And it's really hard letting go because I've had it so long... But, I'm getting a much better one and I'm can't wait! It's happening today!!

I think she's pretty excited there! That was some unplanned video that I found when I was reviewing the footage.

If we’re just meeting, I’m Harley, that was my wife, and this is the House of Hacks where I make stuff out of a variety of materials.

In today’s episode we're going to be looking this cutting table that I made for my wife’s sewing room. It's primarily woodworking, but I also want to touch a little bit on some of the resistance we run into when creating things.

In a previous video, I showed how I made a table for my wife’s sewing machine out of largely recycled materials. In this video, we're going to be doing the same for her cutting table.

Overall design

The ends are filing cabinets that my previous employer was throwing away. And they're attached to a base that's primarily 2x4s and some plywood. This serves to hold the cabinets together so they don't move around and also to provide a little bit of a toe kick.

The cabinets were designed to go underneath desks in cubicles, and so they're designed to have things attached to the top which works perfectly for this application with the table top.

Back here in the middle, my wife wanted to use these cabinets that were designed for maps and blueprints. And here we can see see they’re stacked together, they're a couple inches taller than the filing cabinets on the end, so the design will have to account for that.

Since this table is right behind her sewing machine work area, she wanted this one corner to have a cutout in it to accommodate her serger. That adds a little bit of complexity to the overall design.

So, I took some measurements, got the materials and started to work.

Initial Construction

I started with an 4x8 sheet of plywood. This was several inches larger than I needed on both the length and the width and so cut it down to size.

As I did this, I sliced it off in thin strips. I then glued and tacked these strips to the bottom side edges of the table top to give a little more substance for the edge banding to attach to. I mounted these a little bit proud of the edge so when the glue dried, I could use a router bit to make the edges flush.

My wife has some poplar trim in her sewing room, so I cut some banding out of this for the edges to:

• improve the looks,
• protect the exposed plies of the plywood and
• to tie the different elements of her room together.

I then glued and tacked the banding to the edge of the top.

And then the project sat.. and sat… and sat.

Resistance

I ran smack dab into what Steven Pressfield in The War of Art calls “Resistance.”

Eventually I did get going on it it again.

Steven Pressfield sees Resistance as an invisible inner force that keeps us from exercising our genius, from doing the thing that we were born to do. In the book. he talks about the various forms this can take and different ways of overcoming it.

As a Christian, I don’t know that I completely agree with all the things he talks about. In particular, he talks about praying to his Muse. That doesn’t fit within my faith framework.

But the part about Resistance being a force opposing the creative process does resonate with me. He seems to see it as an impersonal force within ourselves that we have to overcome. I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

I believe we are each made in God’s image and part of that is being imbued with creativity. We’re creative because He is creative.

In what follows, I don’t have any scripture for this. It’s based more on general spiritual principles than direct scriptural support, so don’t take it as doctrine. It’s just musing on my part.

I think Steven is right in that there may be psychological, internal reason we face Resistance when creating things. But I can also see Resistance as being a tool the Enemy of our Soul uses to keep us from doing the very things that God has created us to do. He's always trying to stymie God's plans and purposes in our lives. I think this may be one of the ways he does it.

I suspect it’s probably some combination of the two, both the psychological and the external, and the ratio probably varies from one person to the next.

Habits to overcome Resistance

I started a new job at the beginning of the year and now have a longer commute. To make use of that time, I subscribed to Audible and have listened to a number of books that have been on my reading list for quite a while, The War of Art being one of them.

Another one I listened to is Atomic Habits by James Clear. I found it interesting that some of the things James talks about in forming habits dovetail nicely with some of the strategies Steven talks about in overcoming Resistance.

If you’re interested in using your drive time, or chore time, or any other time where you could listen to a book, sign up at the Audible link below. It’s a 30 day free trial where you get two audible books that are yours to keep, even if you don’t continue past the trial period. Or if you’re already an Audible subscriber, there’s a direct link to both these books below too.

Final construction

Getting back to the project, under the plywood, the table top has a skirt that is boxed in on each end.

The boxes serve multiple purposes:

• they add rigidity to the whole top,
• they provide a mounting spot to attach to the cabinets and
• they fill the space difference between the two types of cabinets.

The bottom of the boxes are made with a thinner plywood and have t-nuts in them to attach to the filing cabinets. The thinner plywood also acts as a top in the serger cutout.

After it was all assembled, I painted the main field and then put a polyurethane top coat over the paint, the edge banding and skirt.

Finished product

With a little help, putting it in place was simply a matter of taking out the old top and placing the new one in its place. And a bolt on each corner keeps it from sliding around.

Join me in this video where I show how I put made the table for my wife's sewing machine. And down here is a playlist of other sewing room related projects.

Thanks for joining me on our creative journey, long as it may take some times.

Now, go make something.

Perfection isn't required.

Fun is!

How to make a binary clock: design

Description

Want to make an Arduino project a bit more complicated than blink? In today's episode of House of Hacks, Harley starts a project on how to make a binary clock. This project will use an Arduino and be presented in multiple parts. Today, the first part will be the overall requirements and design. In future videos, the software, circuit and finishing it off with an enclosure will be covered.

Resources

• All the information to make this project: https://www.house-of-hacks.com/p/arduino-project-binary-clock.html
• If you just want to buy one: https://amzn.to/3eGXFVD (Amazon affiliate link)
• Get a digital version of the new Arduino poster by signing up for the House of Hacks newsletter: https://list-optin.house-of-hacks.com/arduino
• Or a printed copy of the poster can be bought on the House of Hacks store: http://store.house-of-hacks.com

Contents

• 0:00 Project introduction
• 0:59 Welcome and about House of Hacks
• 1:19 Description of BCD
• 2:14 BCD for binary clocks
• 3:05 Project requirements
• 4:02 Controlling the LEDs
• 5:45 Tracking the time
• 6:18 Adjusting the time
• 7:23 Arduino selection

About

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to make a binary clock

Here's a list of the tools I use.

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"

Transcript

A number of years ago, at a software conference, one of the evening activities as an outing to a hands-on science museum.

While there, I noticed and picked up this binary clock.

It uses something called BCD encoding and I thought it'd be kind of cool to make my own version of this as a project.

Technically, it could be done with some simple logic circuits and a timer.

But this would involve more hardware design and wiring than I wanted to be involved with and so I'm going to go the easy route and use an Arduino.

This is going to be done in four parts.

Part one today is the basic requirements and design.

Than as I'm waiting for parts to come in, I'll go over the software design and how to actually do some testing without having a complete circuit finished.

The third video I'll assemble all the circuits and get it running.

And then the fourth video will be creating an enclosure for it.

Welcome to the House of Hacks. If we’re just meeting, I’m Harley and I make stuff out a variety of materials.

For example, in this project, we're doing design discussions, and software and electronics and mixed media for the enclosure.

If making a things out of a variety of materials in the workshop is something that's your thing, consider subscribing and you won’t miss future episodes.

BCD is an acronym for Binary Coded Decimal and this was an encoding system that IBM came up with nearly a 100 years ago in the 1920s for use in their early mechanical devices.

As early computers came on the scene, they took this basic coding that they used and expanded upon it to use in the computers.

It was called EBCDIC at the time and was actually used until relatively recently.

Interestingly, early in my career, I had to write an ASCII to EBCDIC conversion routine for use by our business partners.

Before going to the whiteboard, a couple notes.

First, the code and schematics for this project, is available for free download off of GitHub.

And second, a commercial version of this clock, kind of like the one that I picked up at the conference, as well as all the materials I'm using in the project are available on Amazon. I’ll leave links for everything down in the description below.

In BCD, each column represents a decimal digit, coded in binary. The first column is the tens digit for the hours, the second is the units column for the hours. Next, we have the tens and units digits for the minutes and the tens and units digits for the seconds.

In decimal, we need four bits to cover the all digits 0-9 in binary. So all the units columns on the LEDs have four LEDs. Because on a clock, none of the tens digits go all the way to 9, we don’t need a full 4 bits for each of the tens columns. Hours for example only go to 2, so we only need 2 bits for a 24 hour clock. The minutes and seconds only go to five so we only need three bits for those.

So, to make this, what are our requirements?

For the LEDs, we have 3 groups of 4 and 2 groups of 3 for a total of 18 and another 2 for a total of 20 LEDs that we need to control.

Second, we need a way of keeping track of the time.

Third, we need a way to set the time.

I’ll talk about all these requirements in detail but first I’m excited to announce that I’m working on some Arduino training materials. I have an Arduino reference poster available now and am working on a book for people new to digital electronics and programming the Arduino. A digital version of the poster is available by just signing up to the House of Hacks mailing list where I’ll keep you updated on things happening here. I won’t bombard your email with a bunch of stuff. Just occasional updates when products are released and an occasional news item that I think you might find interesting related to making things. If you’re interested in this, there’s a link below in the description below.

Now, back to the design...

Looking at controlling the LEDs, my first inclination was to think about this as a single string of 20 bits where each digit in each group was put inline with the rest of the bits. The common way of working with large numbers of LEDs is to use a '595 based shift register. This only requires three pins on the Arduino but provides a number of digital outputs. This is so commonly used that there’s a shiftOut command built into the Arduino ecosystem. ‘595 chips typically only work with 8 bits (although there are variants that have more bits) but they can be daisy chained together so you can have an almost arbitrary number of digital outputs, all controlled by only three pins.

Since there’s 20 bits needed and each ‘595 provides 8 bits, I thought about using three shift registers, daisy chained together. This would give 8 times 3, or 24, bits. The first 20 bits would be used and the last 4 bits would be ignored.

I coded up a prototype sketch using this idea but it ended up being more messy than I really liked. All the code was one big blob with a bunch of dependencies spread throughout the whole thing. Some of that mess could be cleaned up with some refactoring, but it was still going to be more messy than I really liked.

Upon reflection, I realized each group of two numbers only needs at most 7 bits and I have three groups. For the purposes of this project, I could still use the three ‘595s but instead of daisy chaining them together, I could connect each one to the Arduino directly. This would help make the code cleaner. Each ‘595 needs three pins, so that’d be a total of 9 pins for the LEDs instead of 3. Let’s look at the rest of the requirements and see if there are enough pins.

To track time, the most reliable would be to use a clock module. A real time clock module, also called an RTC, is designed to interface with micro controllers and has it’s own battery backup. There are a number of different models. I selected to use a DS1307 because they can be had inexpensively and communicate with the Arduino using only three pins over the I2C bus.

It would also be possible to use the Arduino itself to track the time although I’m not to sure how accurate that would be. It would provide a software only solution though.

Finally, we need a way to set the time.

The commercial unit I have uses two buttons. One increases the hour each time it’s pressed. The other increases the minute each time it’s pressed and if they’re both pressed at the same time, the seconds are increased.

This could work, but I don’t have any good buttons that’d be appropriate for mounting in an enclosure and, in my spare parts bin, I have a rotary encoder.

Rotary encoders come in different styles. This particular one allows the user to spin it in either direction without any limits. It can also be pressed to indicate an event. The micro controller can detect which direction it’s turned and take appropriate action.

I think this would be easier to make accessible to the user in the enclosure, so I’m going to use it. It uses two pins to the Arduino to communicate the rotary action and one pin to communicate being pressed.

So, all in all, I’m looking at using 9 pins for the three ‘595s, 2 pins for the clock module and 3 pins for the rotary encoder. A total of 14 pins.

Since I want to keep this pretty compact, I’m going to select the Arduino Micro. It’s only about 2 inches long and about 3/4 inch wide and designed to go in breadboards and pre-made circuit boards with standard hole spacing. And it has 18 digital I/O pins. Four more than then 14 that we need.

I think it should work well.

So, I’ll go order the parts and, while waiting for them, I'll show you the software in this video.

If that video hasn’t been released yet, I’ll see you in this other video where I do an Arduino project simulating wind to make wind chimes sound indoors.

After watching that, go make something.

Perfection isn't required. Fun is!

How To Convert Film Slides To Digital Pictures - Easy DIY setup for any camera

Description

Want to convert slides to digital images? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to convert film slides to digital pictures using the gear you already have. This technique also works for transfer old negatives to digital photos.

Resources (Amazon affiliate links):
Clamp light with aluminum reflector
GE 100 watt equivalent LED lights
Clip on macro lenses

Additional information about camera/lens selection and post processing.

How to shoot to the right (aka ETTR)

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How To Convert Film Slides To Digital Pictures

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Starry," "Touching Moments Two," "Riptide" & "Rocket"

Transcript

Our memories are more like photos than videos. We remember moments. Snapshots in time.

Photos allow us to share these moments with others.

Some may have been there with us and photos give us a common anchor point.

Some may not have been, separated by distance, time or both, and photos allow us to share our experience with them.

Imagine what it’d be like if you could move those memorable moments captured with physical images into the digital world.

You could have a historical record that doesn’t degrade over time.

You could instantly share them others around the world.

You could compile them into new and different ways.

Stick around and I’ll show you how to move from imagination to reality.

In this episode, I’m going to show an easy DIY build to help you digitize either slides or negatives.

Its primary materials are some cardboard and an inexpensive light you can get at the home improvement store or online for less than ten dollars.

And you can use any camera. An SLR if you have one. Or your phone. Or anything in between.

Welcome to the House of Hacks.

If we’re just meeting, I’m Harley and I show you how to create stuff in the workshop.

Sometimes it's out of wood or metal. Today it’s going to be out of cardboard and duct tape.

Basically, we’re going to make a light filled box. This does two things for us.

It diffuses the light nicely so we don't have any hot spots in our final image and it gives us a place to mount either a slide or negative.

Whatever's mounted here gets lit up nicely and then we can use any camera to make an image of it.

I'll show some samples from my SLR and my phone later in the video.

Let’s get started.

The tools we’re going to need are:

• a box knife,
• a straight edge,
• a right angle,
• a pen,
• and a measuring tape.

The materials we’re going to use are:

• some scrap cardboard, (both corrugated and non-corrugated.),
• white duct tape, or you can use white paper or paint,
• shop lamp,
• daylight balanced LED light bulb,
• and glue.

I’m going to be using this inexpensive shop light as a light source. They come in various sizes.

This is one of the smaller ones with an 8.5” reflector. You can get them at any home improvement store or online.

They'll take any kind of light bulb, but I'm going to be using an LED. These run cooler and have great color rendition.

I recommend using daylight balanced for the best color in your final images.

And this one happens to be a 100 watt equivalent.

Since the light is going to be bouncing around inside the box quite a bit, I wanted something with a higher wattage in order to be able to keep the ISO in the camera down lower.

I’ll leave Amazon affiliate links to all of this down in the description below.

First, let’s make a box to contain the light and give us a place to mount the slides or negatives.

This needs to be large enough for the light to mount to and also so there’s enough room for the light to disburse nicely.

Too small and you may end up with some shadows or gradients.

I’m going to use an old cardboard box that was used for shipping.

You could also use some foam board from the craft store and cut it to the desired size.

First I mark a circle where I want to put the light.

Now, I’m going to cut a hole in the cardboard above the reflector for the film mounting point.

I have a number of different film sizes I work with, so I’m going to make this a bit larger than the largest negative I’ll want to duplicate.

In my case it’s 120 film and making it a bit larger keeps the thick edges of the cardboard from casting shadows on the film.

This gives me an idea for the size to cut the rest of the box to.

I want the box to be about as deep as the light is round, so, looking from the top, roughly square.

The idea is to have the light shine in one direction, bounce off the back and then into the film mounted on the same plane as the light.

If we put the light on the opposite side of the film so it's shining directly on it, we might get some hot spots or an unevenness of exposure from the middle of the film to the edges.

Bouncing it this way should help eliminate that problem.

So, this box is a bit larger than I need. I’ll use a box knife to cut it down to size.

I don’t want the inside of the box to be this brownish, cardboard color because that would give us a color cast to the light.

I want it to be as close to a neutral white as possible.

I'm going to line the inside of this box with white duct tape.

But you could also use white paint or glue white paper to the inside. We just need it to be white.

And of course, this step could be skipped if white foam board was used.

Now that the box is white inside, I’m going to tape the box closed.

Next, I’ll tape the light to the box.

To do this, I’m going to first put down a layer of tape on the outside of box.

Then I’m going to tape the light to the tape on the box, making sure to fold over the end of the tape to give me a little pull tab.

By taping to the tape on the box instead of the box itself, it’ll be easy to remove the light without tearing up the box.

We're almost ready to use this, but first we need an easy place to put the film.

In addition to 35mm film cameras, I have a number of cameras that take 120 film and expose it in different aspect ratios.

Some give me square images and some give me wider images.

I’m going to use this thin cardboard to make different holders for the various sizes so I can convert images from any of my cameras.

For each type of film, I cut a large base piece that covers the hole in the box. These can all be the same size.

Then each base gets a smaller hole for a particular film format.

Finally I make holders appropriate for each type of film to hold it in place.

For slides, I cut some cardboard and glued in a U shape around the hole.

Then I glued a small piece of cardboard on the corners to help hold the slide in place.

This will allow the slides to be consistently placed in the same location.

For film, I’ll use cardboard folded to the correct size to make a sleeve and line it with fabric to minimize scratches.

I can then run the film through this sleeve.

Like the area around the opening for the light, I put more tape on the box around the hole where the film holders go and also on the film holders themselves.

Then whatever film holder I need for the project at hand can be taped to the box and removed without tearing anything up.

Now that we have the box constructed, let’s put it to use and get it setup.

I've got a nice stable setup here with the box on the table and the camera on a tripod.

When you set this up, you want to make sure your camera is straight on with the image that you're taking a picture of.

If there's any angle involved at all, one side will be smaller then the other and you'll have distortion that you need to fix in post processing.

They way that I've found easiest to set this up is to level the camera and then raise and lower the tripod until the images were centered between what I was taking the picture of and the camera.

And then I could move the box in and out to change the zoom level until the image completely fills the sensor.

In my case, I have a 35mm camera, full-frame, and a true macro lens and 35mm slides that I'm taking pictures of so I can perfectly fill the image of the slide with the camera.

If you have a different camera, different lens or different film, then the aspect ratios may not perfectly line up and you'll end up with black bars on either the sides or top and bottom in order to see the entire image.

If you're using a zoom lens in your setup, you want to set it to something over 100mm ideally.

This'll give you the least amount of distortion.

If your wider than that, then the edges may get distorted because of the lens optics.

Now that we have the physical setup, we need to setup the settings inside the camera.

There's two things we're concerned with: exposure and white balance.

For exposure, we need to make sure the light's on, set the camera to manual mode and look at just the white light coming out of the box.

We want to set this so that our camera's histogram is as far to the right as possible without actually getting clipped off.

I have a video that talks about this in more detail.

This'll give us the most amount of brightness in our images without glowing out any details.

For white balance, you want to use the custom setting.

How this is setup will vary from one camera to the next, so look in your user's manual to find out how to setup yours.

Now that everything is setup, I'm ready to put a slide in the holder and start making images.

This box will work with any camera.

I just showed an SLR but I've got my phone here and I can use it to just kind of position there and take an image.

It'd be better if I had a tripod for my phone if I was doing a lot of these.

But I don't and hand held works fine enough for demonstration purposes.

I also found that digital zoom works but having a clip on macro lens works even better.

These are inexpensive for cheap ones. They're not perfect lenses but they're satisfactory.

As I mentioned, different cameras, different lenses and different films will give you different aspect ratios and may require some post processing.

Slides of course don't require post processing for color correction but you may need to adjust for crop.

Negatives will need some color correction.

Obviously you need to invert the colors and I go into a lot of details about different camera lenses and the effects that they have and also how to post process negatives in this video over here.

I'll see you over there.

Down here is a video that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.

And when making things, remember...

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Woodworking Measuring Tips - 7 tricks for success

Description

Having trouble getting consistent measurements in the workshop? In this episode, Harley gives seven woodworking measuring tips to improve your projects' success.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Woodworking Measuring Tips - 7 tricks for success

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"

Transcript

Are you having problems with consistent measurements on your projects?

Today, I have 7 woodworking measuring tips here at the House of Hacks.

If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark.

Creativity involves connecting the dots in new ways.

The more dots you have, the more creative you can be.

Here at the House of Hacks, I try to show new connections and give you new dots for your own inspiration.

If this sounds interesting to you, hit the subscribe button and ring the bell notification icon and you'll be notified when new uploads are available.

The first tip is to square the ends that you're going to be measuring from.

This way, if there's any angle, it won't impact the final measurement.

Tip two is to use the same tape measure for your whole project.

This will eliminate any variation from one tape measure to the next, particularly on the ends that move.

Those holes may be slightly different from one tape to the next.

Tip number three is to use a sharp pencil.

This will help minimize any error from the mark itself, both when making the mark and also when lining it up for the cut.

And stay tuned to the end because there's actually a bonus tip at the end.

Tip number four is to use a "V" to mark your cut location rather than a straight line.

This will help reduce the amount of interpretation when lining up to make the cut.

Tip number five is to make one measurement, cut it, make your next measurement, cut it, and so forth.

This will eliminate any drift from the kerf width of the blade.

Tip number six is, if you're making multiple cuts that are the same length, use a stop block.

This way you only have to measure once, it speeds up your production and it also gives you much better consistency.

Tip number seven is to be consistent where you line up the mark with your blade.

The more variance you have in your alignment, the more variation you're going to have in your final product.

And bonus tip number eight is, if you're cutting multiple pieces that are the same length, in addition to using a stop block, if you make multiple cuts at the same time, that'll further reduce the room for error.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey that we're on.

I'll see you in one of these videos over here that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.

And when making things, remember...

Perfection isn't required.

Fun is!

Does a miter saw zero-clearance insert make a difference?

Description

Does a miter saw zero clearance insert help with tear-out? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to make a miter saw zero clearance insert and then demonstrates the results, showing before and after cuts.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Does a miter saw zero-clearance insert make a difference?

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "MTA"

Transcript

Are you getting tear out from your miter saw cuts?

There's two theories as to why this is.

One says it's a dull blade.

The other says it's because you're no using a zero clearance insert, like me.

I've got the original OEM insert.

Today I want to try to test out that theory and create a zero clearance insert and see how well it works.

Zero clearance inserts are an easy afternoon project.

It's really just a piece of wood, cut to the right shape and thickness.

Put in the saw and a kerf cut in it with the blade that's going to be used in the saw.

This means that there's zero excess space around the kerf for things to fall into and in theory it helps support the wood so there's less tear out.

Because it's an easy afternoon project, I want to test this theory.

I've got a piece of old wood flooring from a previous project that I want to use to create a zero clearance insert for my miter saw.

But first, if we're just meeting, I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where I make stuff out of wood, metal and other similar material.

I'm going to be using a bandsaw to cut this to rough thickness and then a planer to get it to the exact thickness.

I'll also use the bandsaw to cut it to shape.

But if you don't have a bandsaw or a thickness planer, you can use hand tools: planes, files, sandpaper and a hand saw is really all you need to create one.

So, don't let not having certain tools stop you from doing a project.

Figure out a way using what you have to make due and get the project done.

Before starting this project, make sure the saw is unplugged.

First we need to remove the old insert. This will be used as a pattern for the new one to get the right thickness and the right shape.

It's held in by six screws. The last two screws are back here behind the fence and they're easiest to get to if the table is rotated to 45 [degrees] to reveal one screw and then the other 45 [degrees] to reveal the other screw.

And once the screws are removed, it just slides straight out.

Now that I have the plate out, I'm going to put it flush with the wood and make a mark for the thickness and then I'll put it on top and mark the outline.

OK. I have the bandsaw setup with the fence so that I'll get a cut a little bit thicker than I'll need and then I'll sneak up on the exact thickness with the thickness planer.

OK, again, this doesn't quite fit because I cut it oversized intentionally so I could sneak up onto a perfect fit using the sander..

OK, let's give this a test fit. It's looking really good actually.

Wow. I'm really pleased with that. There's no discernible movement in that whatsoever.

It's a really nice test fit.

I was wondering about putting the screws back in it and as tight as it is, I don't think I'm going to bother.

I'm going to see how well it works as it is.

It's time now to put a kerf in it and then do a test cut.

So, did it make a difference?

Let's take a close look and find out.

So, this is an interesting result.

Here's the original OEM insert with the old blade.

And here's the zero clearance insert.

To me, there's no real discernible difference. The look pretty much exactly the same.

Now, just for test purposes, I put a brand new blade on and used the original OEM insert and it is much, much cleaner.

So that tells me that the blade makes a much bigger difference than the zero clearance insert does.

Lesson learned: always have a sharp blade if you care about tear out.

I'll see you over here in these videos that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.

And until next time...

Go make something.

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

How To Make A Window Garden Box

Description

Interested in starting plants indoors? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to make a window garden box. His wife setup a plant nursery in their window that needed a way to reflect light back onto the plants to help the plants grow straight. Harley attaches a white shade to reflect light back into the plants.

Here's a playlist of other gardening related videos.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How To Make A Window Garden Box

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Rocket Power"

Transcript

Want to know how to make an indoor plant nursery?

Today at the House of Hacks, we're going to be talking about that.

My wife had this space in front of the window where she wanted to make a nursery for her plants.

So we got her some shelves.

These are chrome plated, kind of utility shelves that have wheels on them so she can move them around to make for easy maintenance, clean-up, that sort of thing.

Then we got her these trays.

These trays have two parts to them. One part has holes in the bottom that you put the soil in and the seeds.

And the second part is solid where you put the water in.

When you put this tray in here, the water soaks up from the bottom and waters the seeds, kind of through capillary action.

And in a couple weeks time, you get this.

The problem with this though is these plants are all leaning towards the window.

They get the sun from one side and there's not enough light coming in from the other direction.

So to solve that problem, we picked up this.

It's a outdoor roller shade and it just goes up and down and the idea is we'll mount it on shelves here and we can roll it down and it should reflect light back in from the opposite side.

We'll see how this works out.

The problem is that it's designed to mount on wood and the shelves are metal.

So, I'm going to have to make a mounting bracket for this to mount it.

And then we'll see how it works.

Welcome to the House of Hacks. If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and I make stuff. Usually it's out of wood or metal.

Today we're going to be talking about making garden materials for inside and we're going to be using a combination of these metal shelves and some wood.

OK, here's the plan.

The shade is just as long as the shelves are and so I can't put anything on top of the shelves and still have the brackets hold this on because it's just too long.

So, I'm going to use this longer piece of plywood and cut it down so the brackets will fit on here like so, and that'll hold everything together.

And then in order to hold this onto the shelves, I've got these two pieces of wood that I'll attach one on each side but close enough in where they'll both fit on the shelves.

And then I'll sandwich the shelf between these long pieces of wood holding this on and these two shorter pieces of wood in the middle just to clamp everything in place.

That's the plan. Let's see how it works.

I have the wood cut to length. I have the holes marked.

The brackets go right on there.

I've got these self-tapping utility screws that are short enough that they won't go through the wood.

And we'll just use the drill to put them in those locations.

And now I've got some longer self-tapping screws that I'll use to mount these two pieces of wood together.

Well, that's installed.

We'll see how well it works long term for helping the plants grow straighter.

Over here I'll see you in another gardening video.

And when making things remember...

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

Transform Your Photography: DIY Kaleidoscope Camera Attachment

If you're looking to add some creative flair to your photography, a DIY kaleidoscope attachment for your camera is a fun and easy project that will allow you to take stunning abstract images.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to make this attachment using simple, inexpensive materials that can be easily assembled with just a few tools.

First, we'll start by cutting three strips of mirror using a glass cutter and a straight edge. Make sure to wear gloves and safety glasses for this step, as broken glass can be sharp and dangerous. If you have trouble getting a clean cut on the first pass, don't be afraid to give it another try. It might take a few tries to get the hang of it, but once you've scored the mirror, it should snap easily along the scored line.

Next, we'll tape the three strips of mirror into a triangle shape to hold them in place while we glue them together. Using a hot glue gun, run a generous bead of glue along each seam to secure the mirror in place. Hot glue is a great material to use for this project because it sets quickly and holds things together firmly.

With the triangular mirror assembly complete, we can move on to creating the mounting plate for the camera. Cut a piece of plywood to the desired size and drill two holes in it. One hole should be slightly larger than a 1/4 inch and will be used to hold the camera in place with a bolt. The other hole should be closer to the top of the plywood and should have a 1/4-20 t-nut for tripod mounting.

Finally, attach the triangular mirror assembly to the mounting plate using a couple of unions and a bolt. Make sure everything is securely in place before mounting your camera on the attachment. Once everything is set up, you can start shooting through the kaleidoscope attachment and creating unique, abstract images.

This DIY kaleidoscope attachment is a great way to add some creativity to your photography and capture unique and eye-catching images. With just a little bit of time and effort, you'll be able to transform your photography and see the world in a whole new way. So why wait? Gather your materials and get started on this fun and rewarding project today!

Additional resources

Originally invented by Sir David Brewster when experimenting with light, kaleidoscope comes from three Greek words. "Kalos" meaning beautiful, "eidos" meaning shape and "skopion" meaning to observe. So literally, "to observe beautiful shapes.”

There’s a great video talking about some philosophical ideas related to the kaleidoscope: Veronica Soare: We are kaleidoscopes

Here's another video featuring abstract photography: burning bulb filament.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.

• Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
• Incidental: "Welcome to the Show" and "Riptide"

Transcript

Interested in abstract images? Both stills and moving?

Today we're going to be doing this at the House of Hacks.

In today's project, I'm going to show you how to make this. It's a DIY kaleidoscope attachment for your camera.

It's basically a mounting plate that your camera bolts to and a triangular mirror assembly that can be rotated around if you want.

You just shoot through it and take a picture of whatever you want and whatever you're making becomes a kaleidoscope image.

This is easily made from inexpensive materials, most of this was actually just scrap that I had lying around from previous projects.

The only thing I really had to buy was a couple unions at the hardware store.

I think that was it.

Everything else I had on hand.

For this build, we only need a few materials.

I've got a base that's 3/8" thick plywood, 3 inches wide and 18 inches long. The dimensions aren't super critical.

I've got a 2x4 that I'll be using to make some brackets out of.

Two unions, ABS, 3 inches in diameter.

And a piece of 12 inch square mirror.

A couple tools that we need:

Some hot glue.

Some tape.

Glass cutter.

And a little bit of hardware.

I've got a t-nut, that's 1/4-20 and a bolt that's 1/4-20 that's long enough to go through the plywood and into the camera and a couple washers to make it so it snugs down tight.

I think that's everything we need. Let's start making this.

Welcome! If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where I make stuff, usually out of wood and metal.

Today it happens to also include mirrors, tape and a little bit of hot glue.

This is the base that, off camera, I drilled two holes in. One is a little bit larger than a 1/4" where the bolt will go through from the bottom and hold the camera in place.

The other is up here closer to about a third of the way up that has a 1/4-20 t-nut in it and this'll be for tripod mounting.

The dimensions of this piece are 3/8" thick plywood. It's 3" wide and 18" long.

The dimensions aren't super critical just as long as you have a good base to mount the camera to and it's long enough for the mirrors that we're going to be cutting.

OK. I've got the gloves on because I want to be safe.

We want three strips of mirror out of here that are 1 and 3/4" wide each and so I'm going to make a mark on where I want that cut.

And I'll lay a straight edge down on those marks. I've got the glass cutter.

We need to give ourselves a little bit of extra room to compensate for the thickness of the glass cutter.

We just press down firmly and we want to just do a single pass.

And then we'll see if this breaks. And I do have my safety glasses on.

And that didn't work too well. I don't think I was pressing down quite hard enough.

Generally, you don't want to try to do two cuts. You want to score it in the first pass. I'll give this another try.

That looks better. I should be able to just... snap it like so.

And we didn't get as good a cut as I would have liked.

If you notice, this edge didn't get cut very well. We'll try again.

And you should hear a creaking sound.

That's much better!

OK. So now we have our three pieces of glass.

And now I'm going to take a piece of tape and tape this into a triangle.

That's just a temporary thing to hold it while we glue it.

Now that we have the mirror in a triangle formation, temporarily held in place by the tape, I'm going to just use the glue gun and run a bead along each of the seams.

And this will be what really holds it in place for good.

We just want to take out time and run a very generous bead along each of the edges.

Hot glue is one of those things that I don't think is really given enough credit in the workshop.

It is a really handy material to work with when holding things together either temporarily or even permanently on projects.

It would be nice if it set up a little bit faster.

One of the cool things about this project is it doesn't have to be perfect. There's a lot of leeway for kind of imperfections that really won't show up in the final product.

This is definitely one of those cases where we're looking for utility over beauty.

OK. I'm going to let that sit for a couple minutes and let that really setup well.

The hot glue has setup and I took the temporary tape off and finished up the seams with some more hot glue there in the middle where the tape was.

And so now we don't really have any sharp edges on this glass. The corners are a little bit sharp but we don't have any cut edges exposed like we did before so we don't really need the gloves.

The next step is to wrap this whole thing in tape. That will do a couple things.

It will make it light tight along the edges so we don't have any light leakage.

It will also, if anything should happen to this and it should break, then it'll help contain the mess and won't get glass all over the place.

I've got some duct tape, so let's start wrapping this up.

Now I'll take the utility knife and just cut the edges here.

I think we have everything now ready to assemble.

The unions I have have a little tab on them from the manufacturing process and I want to put those on the outside of this assembly so I want to make sure I know where those are relative to the mounting brackets.

So, those just slide inside the mounting brackets like so, so now that'll help hold everything together so this part doesn't slide in and out as much.

And now, if everything is setup right, this should just kind of have a pretty snug fit inside these unions. And it's looking really good.

The tape gives it a good snug fit and if it's a little loose, you can just wrap a little tape around this and it'll hold it nice and tight.

So we've got one side in and now the other side should just kind of go in the same way.

And now we're ready to glue this down.

Now when I cut this, I did put one of these edges thinner. So I want to make sure that's on the bottom.

And then when this gets glued in, it'll be just like that.

We're ready to mount this.

I've got the camera bolted to the base plate so that I know exactly where I want to mount this.

So this will mount in front of the lens and I want to make sure that I have enough room for the lens to move in and out but I don't want it so much that I have a lot of light leakage around it.

I made sure I have the thin part of my wood down here and so I think that's pretty much where I want to put it is right about there.

I'll just turn this over and run a bead of hot glue along this edge.

Now I'll turn it over and I have a little bit of set time where I can get things lined up just right.

I want to try to get it as centered as I can and get it going as straight as I can with the camera going along the axis of the mirrors.

It's just a matter of letting the glue set now.

Assembly is complete. Let's go make some images.

I'll see you in this video where I show you how to make some other abstract images using light bulbs.

But in the mean time, let's go make some images.

Remember, perfection's not required.

Fun is!

Universal Mobile Base For Table Saw and other tools - Portamate PM-1100

Description

Imagine, what would shop life be like if you could easily move any tool around? In this episode of the House of Hacks, Harley opens, assembles and installs a universal mobile base for table saw. Used in this video is a Bora Portamate PM-1100 kit that is a DIY mobile base for power tools.

Portamate PM-1100 (Amazon affiliate link)

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Universal Mobile Base For Table Saw and other tools - Portamate PM-1100

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Riptide"

Transcript

Imagine, what would it be like if you could move your larger tools around the workshop?

How would a universal mobile base for your table saw or other tools change your workflow?

Would you have more flexibility for storage?

Would your shop be more space efficient?

Would your tools be easier to use for different sizes of materials?

Today at the House of Hacks we’re going to be looking at how to do this.

About 18 months ago, I went to my Dad’s to pick up some tools that had been my Granddad's. When I got back, I did a video of what I brought back with me and I'll leave a link up here in the cards.

Recently, I made another trip to pick up a few more things that had been left behind. Most notably was a larger table saw that had been my Granddad's and he'd built a base for it.

It's going to be a great upgrade to my current small one but it's much larger and won't fit in the workshop the way it's currently organized.

So I looked at what I needed and what I had and changed my approach to my shop's organization.

Previously, all my large tools were set and ready to use in fixed locations. This had the advantage of being quick to setup.

But it has two disadvantages. One is it takes more floor space because you have to dedicate room around the tool in order to work.

And two, you have less flexibility in your material handling in and out of the equipment.

In addition to the tools taking up floor space, I also had two 6' snap together utility shelves that contained various supplies and small bench tools.

I decided to change to a mobile layout where most of the large tools are on movable bases.

This will allow them to be stored closer together for more compact and efficient use of floor space and it'll give more flexibility for material handling.

This more efficient use of floor space will allow me to get the larger table saw in the workshop.

It does come at a cost though of more setup time.

To accomplish this, I did two things.

First, I split the two 6' shelf units into four 3' shelf units and then hung them from the ceiling.

This allows better space utilization closer to the ceiling and it frees up a lot of floor space.

Second, I converted a number of tools with fixed bases to have mobile bases.

This conversion is the topic of today's video.

But first, welcome to the House of Hacks.

If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and I make stuff out of wood, metal and sometimes other materials. And sometimes I talk about other workshop related topics.

Today, I'm going to be showing the assembly and use of the Portamate PM-1100 universal base kit.

On my previous trip to Dad's, I picked up a large saw with a base that Granddad had made.

I didn't have a permanent location for it, so for expedience, I picked up a mobile base with metal rails.

These metal rails have holes in them in fixed locations for adjustability, but because the holes are in fixed locations, you don't have infinite adjustability.

And so it didn't exactly quite fit the base that I already had. It ended up being about an inch larger than it really needed to be on both the width and length.

I looked around and found the Portamate PM-1100.

This is a hardware kit that has wheels and all the hardware to mount them to a piece of wood.

The piece of wood doesn't come with the kit. You'd make it whatever size you want.

So this allows me to have a base that's exactly the right size for the bases that I already have.

I'll leave an Amazon affiliate link in the description below.

With this design, there's two corners that are designed for the back of the equipment that only roll in one direction.

And there's two corners that are designed for the front with castors that allow you to change direction as you're rolling it around.

The castors are also designed with levers on them so they're up when you're using the tool and it won't roll around and you can push them down, the wheels drop down, lifts the tool off the ground and you can move it.

You supply a piece of wood to connect them at the desired size.

Plywood is usually best for strength purposes.

When I originally bought them, I was planning on just attaching them to the preexisting bases without using any plywood.

However, when I actually got them and tried putting them on, I realized there were toe kicks on the bases that interfered with the hardware raising and lowering mechanism.

So in order to put them where that would work, there wasn't enough material left to attach them to so I ended up going with the plywood anyway.

I cut some plywood left over from previous projects to the desired size, added the hardware to it and attached those assemblies to the bases.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's take a look at what's in the box and how to assemble them.

In the box are two bright orange pieces that are the levers for the cam activation and two plates to mount the castors to.

There are also four corner pieces and wheels.

Two corner pieces are designed for the rear wheels and two are for the front wheels.

There are also four flat plates that are designed to sandwich plywood between them and the corner pieces to provide extra support.

And all the needed screws, nuts and bushings are in a little baggie.

The rear wheel assembly is straightforward.

Using the appropriate bolt, put it through the axel hole from the inside of the base.

Place a bushing on it, the wheel, another bushing and then a nyloc nut on the outside.

Putting the second bushing on is a bit tricky due to the limited space but holding the wheel flat keeps gravity from working against you.

The front wheel assembly has a few more parts.

First put in the foot rest.

This is what will rest on the floor when the wheel is in the up position, keeping the tool from moving around.

It just screws into pre-threaded holes in the corner piece and is secured with a jam nut once the height is set as desired.

Then put a carriage bolt through the top square hole.

Put a bushing on the bolt followed by the orange piece, flat side up, followed by another bushing and pushed through the other side of the support.

A split lock washer goes on followed by a standard nut.

Put another carriage bolt through the other square hole and then the grey plate.

Note that the plate comes pre-lubricated with some grease.

Be sure to put the grease side towards the orange plate and don’t get it on you.

Push the screw through the assembly followed by another split lock washer and nut.

Finally, the castor can be put through the grey plate and secured with its nut.

This nut has a flanged surface that acts as a lock nut and goes toward the plate.

Next measure your tool base to determine how big you need to make your plywood and cut it to size.

The hardware is designed to work with either 1/2” or 3/4” plywood and comes with different length screws for each application.

Depending on the thickness you use, you’ll have screws left over intended for the other thickness.

With the plywood cut to the correct size, place the wheel assemblies on each corner and mark the hole positions.

Then drill the holes.

I used a drill press but you could use a hand held drill.

Just be sure to get them as straight as you can since there’s another metal piece that needs to match up on the other side.

There is some room for play, so it doesn’t have to have super tight tolerances.

But the closer you can get it, the easier it’ll be to get everything lined up.

Once all the holes are made, it’s time to attach the corner assemblies.

Put the corner piece with the wheel in place, put a flat triangle piece on top with the countersink side up and attach them with the appropriate screws.

Note that the bottom piece has a pre-tapped hole so no nuts are required for this operation.

Get all the screws started first, then make sure the corner assembly is tight to the wood before tightening the screws down.

Repeat this process for all four corners and the base is ready to attach to your tool.

How this is done will vary, depending on your tool.

In my case, I just used grabber screws to attach from the bottom of the plywood up into the bottom of the tool’s case.

My Granddad used 2x4 construction for the base’s frame, so there was plenty of wood to attach to.

You’ll have to figure out the best means of attaching this for your situation and provide your own hardware.

Once it’s attached, all that’s left to do is adjust the rubber feet on the front.

You want to adjust them so they support the weight of the equipment when the wheels are in the up position but are lifted off the ground when the wheels are in the down position.

Once in the desired position, tighten the jam nut so they will stay in place.

And, they’re ready to use.

I’ll see you in this playlist of other shop organization ideas.

And when making things, remember…

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

Installing a Fire Extinguisher - Fire Safety in the Shop

Description

June is National Safety Month. In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to install fire extinguisher to help increase fire safety in the shop. In addition to fire extinguisher installation, he'll take a look at the classes of fire extinguishers and see how well some old extinguishers work even though they expired years ago.

Four pack of fire extinguishers (Amazon affiliate)

References:
Wikipedia page discussing fire classes.
Describes how the different classes of extinguishers work.
Contains the PASS acronym.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Install Fire Extinguisher - Fire Safety in the Shop

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"

Transcript

Fire extinguishers are a great thing to have around both the home and workshop.

Today at the House of Hacks I'm going to see how well these old fire extinguishers still work and install some new ones.

In the process I'll also talk about the different types of fire extinguishers that exist and what I choose to replace my old ones.

Welcome to the House of Hacks!

If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and I make things out of wood, metal and other materials. I also talk about other workshop related topics.

Since June is National Safety Month, today I'm going to talk about fire safety in the workshop.

I have these old fire extinguishers that I've had for a number of years that tend to float between the workshop, the garage and the utility room depending on where I'm working.

But they have a few problems.

First, fire extinguishers are only good for so long. The contents in them have a tendency to compress over time and make them less effective. These fire extinguishers are over twenty years old so they're long past their expiration date.

Secondly, they're really small. Even in their prime when they were brand new, they wouldn't have put out much of a fire.

And finally, they're not rechargeable. This means that, since they're expired, they just have to be thrown away.

To remedy these issues, I got a four pack deal of these new fire extinguishers off Amazon. I'll leave a link below in the description if case you're interested.

These are 1) new, 2) rechargeable and 3) much larger.

By getting a four pack, I'm able to place them strategically around the property in places where fires are most likely to occur.

As DIY projects go, installation is pretty simple.

One thing of note though, the Amazon description says they come with wall hangers.

This isn't quite true. They have a loop on the extinguisher to hang them from but no actual wall hardware.

So I went down to the home improvement store and picked up a pack of simple hangers to hang them from.

Here in the shop, I'm going to put it here on the wall with other personal protection gear.

One right here easily accessible from the stairs, next to the furnace in the utility room.

One here in the utility room that's immediately adjacent to both the kitchen and the garage behind me.

And conveniently, there's a stud located right in the middle of the wall.

And here in the garden shed, I was thinking of putting one right here next to the door.

Here in the shed we have fuel and oil and grass clippings and hot engines.

Seems like a really bad combination and a great place for a fire extinguisher.

There are 5 classes of fire that extinguishers might be designed for.

Class A fires are normal combustibles. Things like trash, wood, paper, and plastic.

Class B fires are where the fuel is flammable liquids or gas. Around the workshop, petroleum based products are the common combustable.

Class C fires are where electrical components are the source of ignition. Things around the workshop include sparking motors, transformers and extension cords.

Class D fires where a combustible metal is actually burning. Examples of these types of metals are things like magnesium, titanium, and aluminum. The latter being what would most commonly be found in the workshop.

And the last class is K where combustion is in the kitchen from a liquids used in cooking. Fats, greases and oils are the typical examples. This is actually a special case of class B that was created for the special and unique properties of kitchen fires in the commercial environment.

The new fire extinguishers are designed for classes A, B and C since these are the most common combustables that are going to be found around the home. I figure we're not going to need anything specialized for the kitchen since we're not in a commercial environment where we have the large quantities and specialized equipment that that class was designed for.

Let's head outside and see how the old fire extinguishers work.

OK, we're out here in this controlled environment: the fire pit.

The fire's starting to go and we're going to test out these old fire extinguishers.

I've never actually used a fire extinguisher, so I've don't have any personal experience with it but there is a handy acronym that's used to describe how you're supposed to use them and it's PASS.

P is Pull the pin.

A is Aim at the base of the fire extinguisher.

S is Squeeze the handle.

And the other S is Sweep across the base of the fire.

The idea is you want to aim at the fuel that's providing the fire, not the flames themselves.

So let's let this get going a bit better and we'll give it a try.

Well, the smaller wood seems to be going really well. I don't know if the big wood is actually going to catch fire. It's large enough, it's kind of getting charred but I don't know that it's actually going to combust itself.

So, let's give this little small guy a try.

So, I pull the pin. It's got a little lever here on this particular one.

And the idea is we aim at the base of the fire and squeeze the handle here and sweep across.

So here goes nothing.

Well, there you can see. Even though that 20 year old fire extinguisher worked fine on this little, tiny small fire of course.

It's still a little bit warm. It didn't cool it down, but it did extinguish it and I can still hear the wood kind of popping a little bit, but it does seem to work.

Like I said, that was for a small fire. It was... so like on a kitchen, it'd probably work fine. You saw that it only lasted for a couple seconds, so I don't think it would have done a real good job for anything of any significant size.

At this point, I'm not going to use the other one because I'm guessing it's probably still fairly decent shape and I'll end up putting it somewhere just as a backup.

I’ll see you in the playlist that's on the screen right now of tips and tricks for the workshop.

When making things, remember...

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

How To Make Gardening Tools At Home: Handheld Dibber

Description

Interested in how to make gardening tools at home? Need a seedling planter for your garden? Want to make a simple DIY project for your gardening enthusiast? In this episode in the House of Hacks series' on DIY gardening tools, Harley shows how to make a handheld dibber, also known as a dibbler. Springtime is upon us and making homemade gardening tools can be an easy workshop project for either yourself or a loved one. The dibber is an especially easy-to-make DIY tool to help plant seeds and seedlings that requires minimal tools and time and is particularly suited for kids and beginners. These simple tools make great gifts for the gardener in your life.

Previous video gardening tool video: How to make a long dibber

Inspired by this Charles Dowding video and this blog article.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How To Make Gardening Tools at Home: Handheld dibber

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Chipper"

Transcript

Are you looking for an easy to use gardening tool to plant seedlings?

Do you need a simple to make gift idea for the gardener in your life?

In today's episode of how to make gardening tools at home, we're going to make this handheld dibber.

With spring in full bloom, DIY gardening tools are a popular project for either your own use or to give as gift ideas.

In an earlier House of Hacks episode, I showed you how to make a long dibber out of a rake handle.

A long dibber is useful when planting seeds and seedlings in large beds at ground level.

This handheld dibber is useful in smaller areas, such as raised beds.

Before making the long dibber, I cut off about 12 inches from the end of the handle in order to make this smaller handheld dibber.

Conceptually the idea is the same.

We're going to be putting a rounded point on the end to make holes in the soil for seeds and seedlings but we're going to be adding a few extra features to this one.

In this project I'm going to use a lathe, just to show a different way of doing the same thing, but if you don't have access to a lathe, you could do the same thing as I showed before with a sanding station, or by hand with sandpaper, files or a rasp.

Today, I'll also be connecting two round objects to each other at 90 degree angles.

Stick around to see how I do that.

Welcome! If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where we make stuff out of wood, metal, electronics and other similar materials in order to inspire you on your creative journey.

For this project, to start, I'm going to cut off about 4 inches from the end of this wood.

I'll set it aside and use it later on this project.

Then I chuck the remainder in the lathe and start cutting it down.

The idea is to reform the end from the slight taper to more of a point with a rounded end.

Once I have it to the shape I want, I'll use the marks on the tool rest to inscribe a couple lines an inch apart.

These allow the user to gauge the depth of the hole they're making.

The last lathe operation is a bit of sanding to make everything smooth.

Remember that 4 inch cut-off from earlier?

That's going to be a handle for this piece.

I used the sanding station to put a slight chamfer on each end.

So now that I've taken the dibber out of the lathe, the next operation is to attach the handle.

Originally, I was going to use a hole saw and put a radius on this end for this to sit down inside.

But I don't have a hole saw the right size for this radius and so the next idea I came up with was to use a Forstner bit to put a flat on here and a dowel to join these two together like so.

Overall I think this is going to be a much easier operation.

All that's left is a bit of oil to protect the wood.

It's ready for use.

I'll see you over here in this video where I show you how to make the longer version of this tool for use standing up.

And when making things, remember...

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!

How To Find Lost Camera (Digital) - Use pet tags (Part 3)

Description

Ever lost a camera or other photo gear? Looking for ideas for how to find lost camera (digital)? This is the third in a series where Harley shows ideas that can help a lost camera find its way back home. These travel tips and hacks can help someone who has found a lost camera return it to you.

Engraved pet tags on Amazon (Affiliate link)

Other videos in this series.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to Subtract In Binary Using 2'S Complement

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"

Transcript

Have you ever lost your camera gear?

Are you looking for ideas about how to recover your camera gear if it ever does get lost?

Today at the House of Hacks, I'm going to show you a strategy to help your camera gear find its way home if it gets lost.

I belong to a local photography Facebook group and occasionally people in that group will find camera gear that was left at popular shooting locations. Generally what happens is the person that finds the gear will post where it was found and who to contact to get the gear back. And many times the owner is a member of the group, sees the post and is able to get their equipment back.

Inspired by these posts this is the third in a series of ideas to help you get your camera gear back if it ever gets lost. The other ideas can be found in the videos in this playlist.

Hi! If we're just meeting, welcome I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where we talk about workshop related items. Things made out of wood metal electronics and other things of that nature.

Today we're talking about photography gear.

The previous two tips were a bit on the technical side and required knowledge of the finder to go look for the information and they only worked for your camera and memory cards.

Today's tip is less technical and more obvious for the finder.

And it's this: go get pet tags for your gear.

You can go down to your local pet store and they have engraving machines where you can have anything engraved on little tags. You can then put these tags on your camera gear. At a minimum you probably want one for your camera and your bag but you can get one for any gear that you want to put it on. However you can't put much information on them. Just your name, phone number and maybe an email address.

Another place to get them is on Amazon they have a bunch of different vendors with a bunch of different styles. I'll leave an affiliate link below to a search query showing those different options.

I'd love to hear in the comments below if you have any strategies you use for identifying your equipment.

And remember it's a great idea to use a multi-pronged approach to identifying your gear. For example this way, while it helps for a lot of your gear, doesn't work for memory cards.

I'll see you in one of these videos that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.

And when making things, remember, perfection's not required. Fun is!

How to find lost camera gear - Set contact file (part 2)

Description

Ever lost a camera or other photo gear? Looking for ideas for how to find lost camera (digital)? This is the second in a series where Harley shows ideas that can help a lost camera find its way back home. These travel tips and hacks can help someone who has found a lost camera return it to you.

Other videos in this series: How to Find My Lost Camera
Photography videos: Photography Tutorials

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to find lost camera gear - Set contact file (part 2)

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"

Transcript

Have you ever lost camera gear?

Are you looking for ideas to recover your camera gear if it ever does get lost?

Today at the House of Hacks, I'm going to talk about two such strategies.

Hi. If we're just meeting, welcome!

I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where we do projects related to the workshop, things made out of wood, metal, electronics and other related types of materials.

Today, it's photography gear.

I belong to a local photography Facebook group where occasionally somebody will run across some camera gear that was accidentally left at a popular shooting location.

Generally what will happen is a post will go out describing where it was found and who to contact for more information.

Often times the owner is a member of the group and gets their gear back.

Inspired by these posts, this is the second in a series to help reunite you and your gear if it does get lost.

There's a link to the series right up here.

Our cameras use SD or CF cards to store images on. These are really nothing more than solid state disks that can store any kind of information, not just images.

With this in mind, today's tip is to add a file that contains your contact information in it.

I'm going to show you two ways of doing this.

The first way is to create a text file.

To do this, open a text editor.

On Windows, hit the WIndows key, type "notepad" and hit enter.

On a Mac, hit Command-space and type "textedit" and then hit enter.

Once you're in the editor, put in your contact information. Things like your name, address, phone number, e-mail and website.

Then, save this information on your computer. It can be anywhere you'll remember where it is. Your desktop or documents folders are great locations.

Call the file something that makes the contents obvious. Something like "contact info" or "read me." If you start the name with an underscore character, it'll be at the top of the file list when sorted by name in Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder.

Next, plug your memory card into your computer using a card reader.

The operating system should detect the new drive. Using either Windows Explorer or the Finder, open the card's drive and copy the new file into it.

And you're done!

Do you have any strategies for helping your camera gear find its way home?

Leave a comment below. I'd love to hear it.

And the second way is to create an image with your contact information in it.

To do this, grab a blank sheet of paper. A sheet from your nearest printer will work great.

And then get a marker pen. One with a thick tip is best.

Just write your contact information on the paper and make sure it's legible.

Then take a picture of that page and you're done.

You can keep the paper in your camera bag and then whenever you reformat your card, it's really handy to just grab it and take a picture so that card is now ready to find it's way back home if it ever gets lost.

With either of these tips, if someone finds your camera or your card, all they have to do is take a look at it and they'll be able to find your contact information.

Like the tips in the last video, this is a great first step but it only works for your camera or memory cards. And it requires a bit of thought on the person finding your gear. They have to go look for the information.

And if you ever format the card, you have to put the information back, either copying it off the computer or taking another picture.

In the next tips, I'll give ideas for identifying your equipment that's less technical and doesn't require as much thought on the part of the person finding it. And it'll work for pretty much any item in your camera bag, not just cameras and memory cards.

I'll see you in one of these videos that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.

And while making things, remember, perfection's not required. Fun is!

How to make a portable air hose reel cart

Description

Wondering about how to build a portable air hose reel cart? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows an install method for his new air hose reel that's portable and uses a new-to-him construction material: SteelTek. There are many ways of mounting an air hose reel but sometimes you don't want it in a permanent location. This option will allow you to move the reel around. This is a small test to see the applicability of this product for future SteelTek projects.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to make a portable air hose reel cart

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "The Whip Theme", "Pump", "There It Is", "Guiton Sketch", "Cool Rock"

Transcript

There's got to be a better way.

Hi. If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where we use our God-given creative talents in the workshop to make things out of wood, metal, electronics and other things like that.

Today we're going to be working on a storage system for this compressor hose.

As part of the car project, I picked up a new air compressor. And along with that came a number of new things that are related to the air compressor itself. Things like the air hose and other miscellaneous bits and bobs that are used to connect hoses together and things like that. And eventually I expect I'll be getting some more air tools and I need a place to store those. To help keep the garage organized and less cluttered, I need a place to store some of this new stuff.

I got a ReelWorks hose reel to store the hose on but now I need a place to mount this and I don't want to mount it permanently to the wall anywhere in the garage because I don't really have a good place for it in there and I don't know exactly how I'm going to be using it, where I'm going to be using it, so I wanted a portable solution.

So today I'm going to look at making a cart that this hose reel will mount to and then will also have additional storage that possibly in the future might be expandable to store additional air tools and things like that in that I purchase in the future.

Let's open this up, get some basic dimensions on it because it will be kind of the core around which everything else will be built.

[Unboxing ReelWorks hose reel]

This is what came in the box: the reel, a manual, a strain-relief spring, a connector fitting and the handle.

A little tiny bit of assembly required.

When I ordered the air hose, I also ordered an air filter and a three foot section of hose.

The idea was I will mount the air filter close to the hose reel and that will filter out any contaminants that are in the air line.

I'll get another hose, probably in the 20 foot range, that will go from the air filter to the air compressor.

From my research online, that's a good length to have between the air compressor and the air filter in order to allow time for anything that's suspended in the air flow to condense out and for the air filter to actually be able to be effective.

Then I'll have the longer hose that will wrap onto the hose reel to move around for actual use of the compressed air.

So, let's assemble this, make some drawings and see what we come up with.

[Hose reel assembly]

[Drawing cart elevations]

OK. Here's the concept.

We've got elevation drawings for the front, the top and the side.

The hose reel goes right here and we've got castors on the bottom.

It's 19 inches from the edge of this handle to where this curves up and it's 13 inches tall from the base here where it mounts to the outside edge and it's 11 inches around in this direction.

So the idea is to build a square base that has castors on it depicted by the circles down there so that'll allow it to roll around and have a plate on the bottom that the reel will mount to and then also have two supports that come up and that are joined at the top and it's going to be offset from the center.

It'll be behind the reel.

And that will be what the air filter connects to and then there will be a hose that runs from here down around into the bottom of where it mounts to to connect the incoming air from the air filter into the hose reel.

And I may think about putting some sort of storage media on top here somewhere.

I need to be careful about how big this is though because I don't want it to go above the handle, so it might look like something along these lines where it covers a portion of that space to hold odds and ends and nick-naks.

I don't want it to get all the way to the edge though otherwise it'll make it hard to spin the handle.

So that's the general idea. Let's go see if we can find some parts to build this with.

[Parts shopping]

[Parts cutting]

I was walking through Lowe's the other day in the plumbing department and noticed this really cool material that I hadn't seen in there before.

It's a whole system for making things with. It doesn't really belong in the plumbing aisle as far as I'm concerned other than it has these tubes that kind of looks like plumbing but it's not a plumbing system at all.

It's really a, basically a, Tinkertoys for adults.

They have all kinds of different connectors. These happen to be Ls and I also got some intersection connectors that have one pipe go through on the one direction and has another connector attach something in.

But they have all kinds of different connectors for Ts and multiple intersections coming together in pretty much all the different configurations you can think of of pipes coming together.

They also have adjustable connectors where you can have set screws and put the pipe in and adjust it to different angles depending on the purposes for whatever it is you're building.

It seems like a really cool system.

According to the web site, it comes in 3/8, 3/4 and 1-1/4 inch sizes and in galvanized and in black.

Now my local Lowe's only had it in 3/4 and 1-1/4 sizes and only in galvanized so I haven't seen the smaller size or the black.

For this particular project, the 3/4 is what I got because that was the smallest size they had but it's really overkill.

3/8 probably would have been way more than sufficient.

Each of the connectors have set screws in them that are tightened with an Allen wrench that tighten down onto the pipe and hold it in place.

It seems to be a really solid, robust system and I have a number of projects that I think it'll work really well for but I wanted to use it on this smaller project just for testing things out.

It is not a very cheap system.

These eight connectors and a 10 foot section of pipe ran me about $70 so compared to like copper or PVC that you might use for a similar application from the plumbing aisle where the connectors are in the cents to dollar range, it's much more pricey but it also is much more robust, rigid system.

The pipe comes pre-cut in various lengths from about I think 4 inches was the smallest in I think 2 inch increments up to a certain size and then it started going in foot increments.

The pipe was pretty expensive when purchased in the smaller sections so I ended up getting a 10 foot section which was the longest I could get and the cheapest per foot and then just cut it up to what I needed for this project.

I cut three 20 inch sections for the cross members and four 15 inch sections for the width and the height and now it's just a matter of connecting everything together with the Allen wrench.

Let's put it together.

[Frame assembly]

OK, that's all there is to it. This is a real sturdy system. I'm real impressed. Like I said, this is way overkill for this particular project, but don't have to worry about the hose reel going anywhere.

The next step is to cut some plates to mount things to.

A buddy of mine gave me some of these surplus moving dollies that his company built.

It's basically a piece of heavy duty sheet metal with a bunch of castors on the bottom.

The castors are a little gummed up, a little worn out possibly, possibly just dirty.

So, I'm going to tear these apart, clean them up and cut the metal down to fit in here and use a couple of the castors for the four corners of the hose reel.

[Moving dolly disassembly and cleaning]

OK, that worked really well.

I first started by trying to spray some WD-40 in one of them and realized that was going to take a lot of WD-40 and a lot of fiddling with things so I had the idea to take it upstairs and run them under some water and within seconds of putting them under water they immediately freed up.

That tells me that the thing that was really keeping these things from moving freely was dirt and probably soda.

These things were used to move soda vending machines around and my guess is they just got a lot of soda in there that kind of caked the dirt in there and made everything really gummy because, like I said, within seconds of putting it under the water they were moving freely.

I did use some soap and tried to clean things up pretty well. Had a lot of dirt come out of it as I was running it through the water and now I've kind of soaked them in WD-40 to drive all that moisture out, to lubricate them a little bit and to protect the surfaces from rust.

WD-40 makes a great solvent and water displacer. It does a little bit of surface protection and lubrication but that's not really it's strength.

So, once this WD-40 kind of evaporates out and displaces all the water, I'll get some oil, 3-in-1 oil or something similar to that, and just kind of lubricate this up for long term lubrication and protection.

The next step is to take those metal plates and cut it down to try to make it fit for the frame that I made earlier.

[Metal cutting, filing and drilling]

[Final assembly]

Well, that's a lot more compact and I think it's going to be easier to use. I don't have to unroll the whole hose in order to use things and we've got the filter on it now.

I didn't get it as far done as I would have liked. I would have liked to have painted the wood and gotten the storage system on top but I just have other projects I need to get to and ran out of time.

So, I'm going to call this good for now. Eventually I can do those as future upgrades.

Over here are some videos that YouTube thinks you're going to enjoy and remember when making things, as this demonstrates...

Perfection's not required. Fun is!