Wood Sculpture- from the archives

 

Griffin made this mixed media wood sculpture more than 10 years ago. He started with a 3x3 piece of wood, and then drilled, sawed, and painted it. Next, he added hot glue, duct tape, nails, screws, roof shingle, ribbon, yarn, and plastic pieces. 

This was probably from before his Frankenlog series of sculptures that had personalities, moving parts, or useful features.

Solar Power Part 5- Charge Controller and Marine Battery

 I have been working on my solar power bank system for over three years. I have a solar panel in front of my window, connected to some 12-volt batteries. I mostly used old sealed lead-acid batteries with a couple of new ones. Unfortunately, I didn't add a charge controller. I thought the system would be fine without it. However, when I was away for a few months, the solar panel continued to charge the batteries every single day but there was no load drawing power. Unfortunately, it is bad for this type of battery to keep overcharging it (although not nearly as bad as overcharging lithium batteries). Other times, the batteries got over-discharged, which is also bad.

After four years, some of the old batteries were barely putting out any current. I decided to get a new battery, and add a charge controller this time. The new battery is a marine battery I got from a neighbor. It's not brand new, but it definitely works well. It is designed to start a boat engine, not for off-grid energy storage.

I made a battery terminal from copper tubing so that it could be crimped onto the end of a wire. I cut a short length with a hacksaw and then split part of it open with a utility knife. Wow, copper is soft! After I attached the wires, I covered up the positive terminal to ensure nothing could accidentally short out the battery.  

The charge controller will ensure the battery doesn't get overcharged or over-discharged in the future, even when I'm gone for a few months. I should have added a charge controller a long time ago. They are cheaper than I thought.

affiliate link to charge controller https://amzn.to/3MAjxT8

Wooden Hangers

We have lots of cheap plastic and metal hangers. They often end up breaking, but we saved some parts to recycle. The first wooden hanger I made was for pants, and was a way to reuse the metal bar and clips from a broken hanger. I used more of the oak flooring scraps for the wooden parts.

The next hanger I made was a prototype of a shirt hanger. Because the wood flooring is so sturdy, it doesn't need a cross bar. I could probably make a hanger that will hold a shirt and pants, but it would be more work and more sanding.

The next two hangers still need hooks. I tried to build them like an assembly line, but I got impatient waiting for the glue to dry. My mom's advice was to add a dowel to increase the strength of the joint, but the pieces shifted while I was drilling the hole. On the next one, I added staples to hold the joint steady while the glue dried. I clamped one hanger in the garage vise, and the other one in the workbench vise in the shed while they dried.

After the glue had dried, I used a router bit in my drill press to round over the edges. Then I used my belt sander to smooth everything. This is important so that the hangers don't snag the clothes.

USB-Powered LED Lamp

While walking in my neighborhood, I found a section of 1 inch diameter wire. It had a thick layer of plastic insulation and then a 3/8 inch bundle of aluminum wires inside. I don't really have a reason to use this large size of wire, so what could I do with it besides just recycling it?

I was inspired to make a desk lamp that would take advantage of the structure of the wire. I used an old gearbox as the base. I used a piece of oak with three LEDs for the top. I added a single-pole double-throw center-off switch. It selects which current limiting resistor is used in the circuit. It uses a 100 ohm resistor for the high brightness, a 2500 ohm resistor for the low brightness, and a capacitor to smooth the transition between brightness levels. I haven't moved the capacitor inside the base yet. The thin positive wire is outside the insulation of the large wire.

 

 Last night, I wanted to take a photo of the lamp in action. In order to take a photo, I set up a tripod outside (where it was completely dark) and turned off the flash on the Nikon camera. It chose the correct settings automatically- exposure time 4s. The daytime photo had exposure time 1/500s. Both had ISO speed 100 and f stop 4.5 in aperture priority mode.

Laundry Basket Upgrade #2

 

After the successful upgrade of my rolling laundry basket to replace the plastic axles and wheels with better ones, I decided to upgrade my second laundry basket too. That way I can have one for clean laundry and one for dirty laundry. First I tried using a round plant stand. It was made of wood with 4 swivel wheels. I didn't need many tools to attach it and it did slide smoothly, but it was hard to steer.

I decided to upgrade again. This time, I used large plastic wheels from an old grill. They are designed to roll a heavy grill, so they work well for a laundry basket. With two wheels, the basket needs to be tilted to roll. So I needed to add a handle. This basket didn't have a handle like the other one did, but I based the design on the other basket's handle. I used two strips of oak flooring and a piece of PVC pipe. 

Drill Press- Replaced Feed Handles with Golf Balls

When I used my drill press for a recent project, I found that the feed handles made my hands hurt. I decided to replace them with bigger knobs. I happened to have extra golf balls. These are old golf balls that I had lost in the backyard but found again recently when we were cleaning up after a tornado. 

Drilling through golf balls was messy and created colorful swarf. Golf balls are slippery and round so it was important to clamp them well. First I drilled a small hole 1/4 inch from the bottom then a larger hole 1/2 inch from the bottom. 

Cross section of hole in golf ball (not to scale)

All I had to do was unscrew the old handles and screw on the golf balls. If I get tired of the golf ball handles, it will only take a moment to put the stock handles back on.

Comparing old handle with a golf ball

Drillbit Sharpening #2- Drill Doctor 750X

Three years ago, I tried sharpening drill bits with a cheap sharpener. I got frustrated because it was hard to use and I didn't get very good results most of the time. The old sharpener would make the bits worse instead of better.

This summer, I finally bought the expensive Drill Doctor 750X. It is much easier to use, and actually works! It's faster and more precise. So far I've been getting great results with it.

Before

After sharpening

I bought a Drill Doctor at Northern Tools with a coupon. It's also available through Amazon, so here's my affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3FKJugS

Redesigning a Rolling Laundry Basket

 I bought a standard plastic laundry basket with wheels. It has a handle at the top so it can be tilted and rolled kind of like a suitcase. But even in the process of moving in to my dorm room, the plastic wheels and plastic axles began to fail. They still kind of work, but they are wobbly, scratched, loose, and don't always roll. Sometimes I have to check several floors in different wings of the building to find an open washing machine, which means rolling a full laundry hamper over a long distance.

I had an idea to add really good wheels to this basket. I had to wait until spring break because I didn't have all my tools with me, and I also needed to shop for the wheels. I found rubber-coated wheels with metal brackets that are designed to hold enough weight. I used sections of a metal barn door rail that was going to be recycled, and cut it into shorter pieces with my angle grinder. Then I drilled holes and added threads. I added wood strips on the inside to spread out the force. Now my laundry basket rolls very smoothly!

Dough Proofer Box

 My family like to buy frozen balls of pizza dough. This is a cheap way to make pizza which tastes good and can be customized. To use the frozen dough, it has to be thawed in the fridge overnight and then set out to rise at room temperature for 6 hours. But room temperature during the winter can be too cold for dough. Setting the dough on top of the DVR helps keep it warm, but I thought of a better solution.

I had a small electric cooler. It's like a tiny fridge, but uses peltier cooling. It's not very efficient and is only advertised for keeping drinks cool, not for safe food refrigeration. It has no temperature controls, just runs at full power all the time it's plugged in. I knew that it's simple to reverse peltier cooling to make a heater. Then I just needed a way to regulate the temperature. I needed a way to automatically turn it off if it gets too hot, and turn it back on if it gets too cool.

I found a thermostat that would work. It's the kind you might find on the wall to control your air conditioning or heat. It has an easy-to-read dial to set a temperature and show the current temperature. It's ridiculously large for this project, but it was on sale for only $2. I looked at the simplicity of the description and pictures on the box and incorrectly assumed it was an old school mechanical thermostat. It turned out to be a newer one, requiring a CR2450 battery plus 24 volts AC all the time.

It took some experimenting with power supplies to figure out how to get it to turn on and send signals. Then I needed to add a relay. I ordered one from Amazon, but it took longer to ship than I wanted. I finished all the other parts of mounting a project enclosure box, transformer, fuse, fan, and heat sink, then testing to make sure the thermostat measured temperatures accurately, and making sure the peltier produced heat well when run in reverse. 

I used metal strips to hold the project box onto the cooler. I also added a small board with red and green LEDs to show the status of whether the heater was on (not at correct temperature) or off (up to temperature).

I was very impatient for the relay shipment to arrive because I had finished everything else I could on this project.

Amazon Affiliate link for the relay: https://amzn.to/3qk6cpP

Finally, the relay arrived, and it took less than half an hour to install it. It worked perfectly. I haven't tested the dough proofer with dough yet, but we did use it to melt chocolate.

If you need a dough proofer, there are commercial solutions out there. Some ovens might even have a low temperature setting for this. There are probably easier ways to convert a cooler to a proofer, or at least with a smaller thermostat. But this project was good because it helped me learn about thermostats without having to spend much money.

Turning Two Broken Drills into One Working Drill

 

We had a Worx "switchdriver" that had a feature of switching quickly between two different bits by rotating the front half. This was convenient for putting a drillbit in one half and a screwdriver bit in the other, and switching back and forth quickly. Here's an Amazon Affiliate link to that drill: https://amzn.to/330y3mh

Picture from Amazon.com

Unfortunately, this drill stopped working. Griffin looked inside, but didn't want to completely take it apart until his dad figured out if it could be replaced under any type of warranty. So he put it on a shelf for about a year. When he took another look at it recently, he figured out that motor was fine but the speed controller failed.

Today, Griffin tried to use another cordless drill to help replace the handle on a garden rake. But when he started drilling, smoke came out of the motor of the cordless drill. He figured out that the motor of that Craftsman drill had burned out. 

So now Griffin had two broken drills- one with a good motor and bad controller, and another one with a good controller and bad motor. He wondered if he could combine the good parts from each to make one working drill.

At first glance, the motors looked identical. They were exactly the same size, and the gear on the motor shaft looked like it was the same size too.

 Griffin tried to fit the good motor into the other drill. First, he swapped the plastic coverplate that needed to lock onto the gearbox. 

The gearboxes did look different- one had five gears that surrounded the gear on the motor shaft, and the other had three. But that shouldn't matter if the motor shaft gear of each motor was identical. He tried and tried to get the motor to fit, but something was wrong.

Mom took a look and noticed that one gear had 11 teeth and the other had 12. Oh no! The only way to make this work would be to swap the gears from the motor shafts. Unfortunately, these gears weren't designed to come off. How frustrating!

Griffin used pliers, screwdrivers, hammers, crowbars, and a vise to pry the gear off the good motor. He got it off without damaging the motor. Next, he had to get the gear he needed off the bad motor. Unfortunately, the entire shaft came out of the motor with the gear. He was able to hammer the shaft out of the gear using a nailset. 

He transferred the correct gear to the good motor shaft, and then reattached the plastic coverplate. Success! The gears meshed together correctly and the plastic coverplate locked the gearbox on. 

Then he soldered the wires to the motor and screwed the housing back on. Success! The drill works great now. It sounds slightly rougher than it used to and the light does not work