16 February
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In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
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Some more – increasingly rare – time in the shed over the last week or so, and I started cutting the top shelf for the desk. While I had the desk assembled to this stage the last day, I scribed the top shelf angles with pencil and set the board aside. Then this week, after thinking about it a bit, I double-checked the angles of the sides of the walnut board – because it’s the core around which all this is built – and then I used the angles of the walnut board, and the width from the scribe marks (and yes, I double-checked thatRead More →

02 February
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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). That’s going toRead More →

02 January
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In Electronics, New Toys!
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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. Yes,Read More →

01 January
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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 paintRead More →

01 January
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In Food
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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 theRead More →

11 December
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In Electronics, General, Hardware, New Toys!, Robotics
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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). That was fifteen years ago though.  Meet the modern version:  The YDLIDAR X4, evolved from roomba sensors and possibly a knockoff of a slightly more well-known sensor. Weighs next toRead More →

14 October
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In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
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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. The back end broke out because of short grain: But you can see that the gaps aren’t as bad at the back end due to the angle being inconsistent. There are a few different hand methods to cut the jointRead More →

13 October
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In Desk Shelf, Woodworking
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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. And since I’ve been away and am now rusty, out with a bit of beech scrap to try toRead More →

28 September
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In General, Science Fiction
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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. And they’re EVA (Ethylene Vinyl Acetate) foam and are the base material used by cosplayers for a lot of costumes and props (that’s the grown-up’s word for “toy”): Yes, that’s a 9 foot tall hulkbuster Iron Man costume made entirelyRead More →

09 September
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In Desk Shelf, Shelves, Woodworking
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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 complexRead More →