brainwagon

A few weeks ago I was at a garage sale, and picked up a few old tools for just a few bucks. One of the things I got was a little tool caddy for $1. It basically is a box with a central handle, constructed from 1/4″ plywood and divided into a number of compartments. […]

After yesterday’s success in building a little garden stool, I wanted to get back into the garage to do a little more woodworking. Sadly, today was the last day of my “staycation”, and I still had quite a few chores. I spent part of the afternoon breaking out the pressure washer to clean the mold […]

Okay, after all the drought-ending rain we’ve been having, our yard has turned into a lush jungle of various kinds of weeds. Part of it is just grass which has sprouted above the black landscape cloth in the mulch, but other areas were more or less unimproved since we finished our retaining wall project last […]

I have been trying to do a bit more wood working in my garage, with the net result that a fine layer of sawdust is settling everywhere. I had started to use my aging Ridgid WD12000 4.5HP 12 gallon wet-dry vac attached to my table saw and my newly finished router table. But just using […]

I’ve slowly been trying to do some woodworking projects. I have very little skill and experience. In the past, I had (barely) enough skill to put together some simple Dobsonian telescopes out of plywood, using mostly a handheld router and a jigsaw, but they weren’t actually very accurately made (especially compared to the tolerances the […]

So, my idea is to use a cheap but reasonably accurate RTC chip module based upon the DS3231 chip to periodically wake a sleeping Arduino. I tried getting it working yesterday, but had little luck. I don’t know whether it was Bailey’s insistence on being petted or simple sleep deprivation, but it eluded me yesterday. […]

Last night, I did a small amount of work on two projects. I applied some Wood Bondo to a couple of bad defects in my garden bench project. I hadn’t used it in a while, and forgot what a pleasure it was. Sanding should be finished up shortly and I’ll definitely have it painted and […]

I must admit to a certain amount of jealousy about people who demonstrate an ability to start and finish large projects. Granted: I have a full time job and that job is not tinkering with my little home projects. But when I see someone construct a complex prototype of electronics, a large piece of woodworking, […]

Last night, the weather was pretty rainy. I woke up a couple of times during the night (once, when my little cat friend Bailey decided to check my breathing and started head butting me around 4 AM) and heard a lot of rain falling on the roof. When I woke up, it was fairly wet […]

So, last night about 9:30PM I decided to spend a little time in my garage workshop. I cleared some items off the top of my rolling workbench and decided to do a short bit of work on two projects. A couple of days ago I had started making a cross cut sled for my tablesaw. […]

Okay, a few weeks ago I bought a little Dewalt DW745 table saw for use in my garage. I’ve never actually owned a table saw, but lately I’ve been wanting to do more construction, and I thought investing a fairly small amount of money in a table saw would be a good way to go. […]

I heard some friends of mine that I haven’t seen in some time were having an estate sale, so I drove over to say hi and, well, to also see if they had anything interesting. Lately I’ve become interested in doing more work in my shop, and I’ve always had a bit of a fondness […]

A couple of days ago, I found out about thecavepearlproject.org through a link on hackaday, and an article which gave an interesting idea about how to do temperature sensing using an Arduino and no additional parts. I didn’t really recap the actual underlying technique. The idea was a fairly interesting one. The watch dog timer […]

I’m still heading toward changing my Creality CR-10 over to use a BLTouch bed leveling sensor, but I still need a few parts that I’m waiting on. I thought it might be a good time to try some prints with a filament that I never used before: namely a roll of Sainsmart TPU filament that […]

Over the last couple days, I’ve been pondering my journey through 3D printing. After having taken a three month break from it (more on that below) I’ve managed to get my Creality CR-10 back up and running in a reasonable way, and have donated my Anet A8 (my gateway drug to the world of 3D […]