Well, this is going way in the opposite direction from all the beautiful woodworking projects, but I’ve always been pleased with my own thriftyness and ingenuity for this one.
Problem: I have nowhere for my toothbrush.
Confounding factors: I have extremely limited bathroom counter space, and a cat who likes to knock things over.
Recourses: I live in a weed-legal state, and preroll joints come in these skinny plastic tube with a hinged lid.
Oh, and I got back into candle making again after a few years. The one on the left kinda sucks, but the green is more vibrant. The one on the right has a far more muted color, but better structure.
My kitchen is a dark cave with a non-functioning overhead light so over a decade ago I made two lamps. They hung out on the counters until two years ago when I purchased hanging overhead lights for the kitchen and got back my counter space. Also recently I refurbished my Gothic Furniture dining room table that was worse for wear. I wanted to refinish the top but there was too much bubbling and lifting of the veneer and I didn’t feel I was up to the task, so I painted the top and Restor a Finished the apron and legs. This pic is one lamp re-done on the refurbished dining table.
This past weekend, we refurbished a beat-up picnic table. I say “we”, but I’m stealing my husband’s thunder. He cut the new wood and did all the painting; I just helped disassemble and reassemble. I wish I’d thought to take a before picture, the difference is night and day!
A few weeks ago, after we learned about properties of logarithms, I did a slide rule lesson with my precalc students. We had already covered complex numbers, and one of my students asked if slide rules could do imaginary numbers. I thought about it a bit, and then thought about it more, and spent most of the rest of the day coming up with a design. And only then, of course, did it occur to me to look it up, and discover that of course the design already existed.
Well, I just finished it, and it works.
In case anyone’s wondering (hey, this is the Dope, if there’s anywhere one can find folks who know how to use a slide rule, it’s here), the direction along the cylinder works like an ordinary slide rule, and is the amplitude of the numbers, while the direction wrapping around the cylinder is the phase. Once I realized that, it was just a matter of graphing the curves of constant real part and of constant imaginary part.
The two SVG files (both created in Desmos, with a little editing in Notepad for the annotations and to get the colors right) are both printed out, one of them on normal paper and one on a transparency slide. The paper one wraps around a cylindrical plastic core (that I 3d printed, so I could get the circumference just right), and then the transparent one wraps around that.
I learned how to use a slide rule when I was a teenager (it wasn’t required learning, I just wanted to know how they worked). But then with computers and calculators I never really needed it and I haven’t used one since.
Time to think about and start making my handmade Christmas stocking stuffers. This year I got a tub of Dollar and a Quarter Tree Lightweight Spackle and am loving the texture and how easy it is to work with. I cannot imagine using it as real spackle, however.
I really like the round tea light holder with the jewel doodad, but I think the winner will be the coasters as they are much faster and easier to make and I kinda love them too.
Perhaps a bit industrial but here are two Sanford bench top surface grinders I just restored to sell. These are the smallest “real” surface grinders that were made and are collectible and very useful for a home shop with limited space. Here is a photo of the gray one as I found it and two photos of the completed machines.
Not much to show until spring, but my daughter and I planted 140 bulbs today along the new front walks. Thank gods for her, I was exhausted and probably did only a third.
We had a family project making gifts this year. We decided to make trivets from clothespins. The kids mostly did the taking apart of the clothespins, but one kid also made one of the round trivets.
Square ones. A little underwhelming to me, but these were so much easier to put together well.
The round one is showier.
This is a jig I made from LEGO, wood blocks, and a clamp. The clamping force tended to make the pieces move vertically, so I had to add the LEGO pieces over the top to help prevent them from bowing.
This is one I haven’t made. It may be more of an art project than a trivet due to the shape.
It turns out that none of those are very structurally sound. I dropped one of the square ones while sanding, and it broke in two. One of the round ones also broke apart.
This led me to create this design, which has the same pattern on the top and bottom, but rotated 90 degrees.
There’s just a ton more gluing surface on this one, so I think it will be much sturdier. The other patterns are all ones I saw online, but I came up with this one on my own. Unfortunately I figured it out after we did our gift giving for most of the family.
