02 February
By
On
In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
With 2 Comments

Shed time again (yes, it’s been a while, work stepped up a notch and it’s been a bit miserable and chilly here (granted, not -40C but you can’t move in my shed very much so you feel the cold rather a bit). Chopped the last housing joint and then spent some time wrestling with pieces that are definitely too large for the shed to do a test assembly.

Rather awkward to put together (and those clamps are the largest I have, they were comfortably large enough to make the workbench with padding on the clamps and still they only barely make it).… Read the rest

02 January
By
On
In Electronics, New Toys!
With 4 Comments

So at the same time that I bought the lidar, I had dropped about a hundred euro on aliexpress on other stuff as well. Most were presents or non-present things for xmas or general stuff like torches, but a few were just for me to play around with on the Raspberry Pis that have been building up around here — an old project came home from work and I realised I had one Raspberry Pi B+, two Zeros and three Zero Ws, one of which I had ordered back in October because I had literally lost one of the two Zeros in my toolbox.… Read the rest

01 January
By
On
In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
With 0 Comments

So the last time I worked on the desk wasn’t as far back as October, but I didn’t get a chance to write it up (work has been a tad busy and other stuff has also been eating time). But with xmas dinner done, holidays finally kicked in for me and after collapsing for a few fallow days, I got back out to the shed in the last day or so. And managed to avoid breaking my neck on the decking outside the shed as well (some anti-moss napalm has been deployed and I’ll have to repaint that decking with some sort of high-traction paint before any really cold weather hits I think, and possibly drill a few sneaky drainage holes against standing water).… Read the rest

01 January
By
On
In Food
With 0 Comments

More cooking this year. Didn’t do the turkey, but did do the beef wellington which went well thanks to cooking the steak sous vide after a quick sear and remembering to wrap it in filo pastry (with mustard on the inside) before wrapping it in puff pastry.

Also did a few sides, like cornbread muffintops and pommes dauphin which were the best (or so I thought) – half mashed potato (made particularly dry) and half choux pastry (also made a little dry), and deep fried for around eleven minutes to make large potato-sized golden brown potato dollops that were crunchier than roast potatoes on the outside and lighter and fluffier than thrice-cooked chips on the inside.… Read the rest

11 December
By
On
In Electronics, General, Hardware, New Toys!, Robotics
With 2 Comments

Way back in the mists of time, I mentioned how we had laser scanners in the CVRG (one of which was mounted on Dagda for a while). We used the SICK for a long while, which is a block of steel that’s pretty adept at toe crushing, only scanned through a partial circle and was enormously expensive (and later we acquired a 3D scanner which was even more expensive but could at least do 360 degrees).… Read the rest

14 October
By
On
In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
With 0 Comments

So looking at the pieces of scrap I was practicing on yesterday, I see that the power-cut dovetail has a consistent angle but the edges are anything but sharp and there’s a problem with blowout:

While the hand-cut version is messier but holding:

A bit more practice would clean that up. It’s slower, but it leaves you with all your fingers, which is a plus.… Read the rest

13 October
By
On
In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
With 1 Comment

So after weeks of not getting to the shed at all because of work and feeling pretty guilty for that, I finally got out there for a few hours today. The next step in the project is the sliding dovetails – the main desk surface shelf has been cut to the right angle, the sides are both shaped, the top shelf and middle shelf are both ready to have the angles cut but I want to get the sliding dovetail for the desk surface done first.… Read the rest

28 September
By
On
In General, Science Fiction
With 1 Comment

Yet another diversion from the desk (where I’ve done almost all of the basic shaping and am ready to start cutting the sliding dovetail part which is the complicated bit).

This is a floor mat:

They’re cheap, they’re foam, they go together like a jigsaw, and they’re being sold everywhere (including the local car parts and doo-dads shop halfords near us) for very little money.… Read the rest

09 September
By
On
In Desk Shelf, Shelves, Woodworking
With 0 Comments

So I was really just at a low energy setting this weekend, and it was one of the first rains of the coming winter and even just looking at the shed was making me tired, but I have been wondering about something with the design of Calum’s shelves/desk thingy, which is whether or not to put a backing board behind/between the top two shelves. It’d stop stuff falling off the back of those shelves, give a larger contact area with the wall, and stiffen up the whole carcass; but it’d change the look of the unit quite a bit and the joinery might get complex unless I cheated and used a router to carve out a rabbit for the panel.… Read the rest

03 September
By
On
In New Toys!, Tools, Woodworking
With 2 Comments

So I recently had a birthday and bought myself a present that I’d been thinking about for a few years but had been putting off because spending a chunk of money on a small thing is usually painful and if you’re not going to be doing something long-term, a bit of a waste, but I finally convinced myself that this making stuff thing wasn’t a fad, so after some advice from the pros I went off to one of my usual sources for new tools and bought…

A red box!… Read the rest