Category: Maker
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Making Name Puzzles with the X-Carve
For a couple of the younger kids on my Christmas gift list this year, I made name puzzles with my X-Carve. The puzzles are made out of Baltic birch plywood; the letters are 1/4″ thick and the base is 1/2″ thick. I cut out the letters of the name (and some additional puzzle pieces) with…
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I Built a Shoe Cabinet
Our front entryway usually looks something like this: Those are bins to hold shoes; they’re uncharacteristically empty in this picture, but with as many as seven kids in the house at any given time, they’re usually overflowing (and not nice to look at). We decided to get a shoe cabinet to keep the shoes (and…
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Functional Print and CNC Carving Mashup: Mini Air-Hockey Pucks
In today’s Don Rickles news, I 3D-printed and CNC carved some mini air-hockey pucks. We were given a mini air-hockey table this week, but it didn’t have any pucks, and after buying some at Walmart, we learned that the table didn’t use full-size pucks. After five minutes in OpenSCAD and half an hour of machining,…
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Box, the Sequel
In the comments of my last box-building post, Cain posted a link to a video tutorial for making a mitered box. I still needed storage for more 35mm slides, so I followed the tutorial to make a 35mm slide case out of quartersawn red oak.
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I Made the Bower Power Industrial Tripod Fan
My wife came across this DIY tutorial from Bower Power on how to make your own industrial-style tripod fan, and she loved it. Of course, what my baby wants, my baby gets: I cut the tripod center on my CNC router because I still need to justify its purchase. Leave a note in the comments if…
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My First Time Boxing
I’ve built lots of larger things, but small delicate pieces have always eluded me. Therefore, it is with great pride that I show off my latest project, a box for holding 35mm slides.
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Building a gravity chicken feeder (for gravity feeding, not gravity chickens)
It’s not that I don’t enjoy feeding our chickens every day, but when they started pecking at my toes because their food dish was empty for too long (a.k.a. more than five seconds), I decided to build a gravity-powered feeder that would keep them fed for weeks at a time. Here’s the finished product. Note the…
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Look at what I did in the bathroom!
My wife requested a cabinet to hang above the toilet in our downstairs bathroom, and she sent me a link to this Shanty 2 Chic design as an example of what she wanted. Usually, I would draw up my own plans, customizing them based on the materials I have and the space I’m filling. This time,…
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The United States of Rock
I’ve been mining stone out of the side of my hill to use for a patio, and would you believe that as I was setting them aside, they naturally took on this shape? Well, you shouldn’t.
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There ain’t nobody here but us chicken coops
My wife texted me this about six weeks ago. She had ended up in a farm supply store with her mom and our kids, and they had baby chicks for sale: We ended up skipping the duck, but six weeks later, we have two six chickens and a very sturdy coop. I began buying coop materials as soon…
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Artisanal CNC-Carved Growth Chart
My kids have been requesting a growth chart, so I made one with my X-Carve. I used red oak left over from when I built our dining room table. It took three separate carves to get all six feet of numbers and inch delimiters carved since the X-Carve’s workable area is only about 30 inches…
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Get yer laundry! Piping hot laundry!
A recent project I tackled was adding a spot in our laundry room to hang up clothes to dry. I attached iron pipe to the wall studs via some flanges and for the shelf, I used some barn wood that I’ve been hoarding for a few years. The total planning time for this project was about…
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CNC-ing a Stepstool out of a 1×12
My wife requested that I make matching stepstools for our hall bathroom so that the smaller children could reach the faucets. I used the opportunity to design a stepstool that could be carved out of a 1×12 and assembled in minutes. I used Inventables’s Easel software to design a stool that would be 12″ tall…
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I Built a Set of Cabinets with CNC-Carved Doors
The area above our washer and dryer (not pictured) was mostly wasted space, so my wife asked me to build some custom cabinets. (Actually, she said, “Can you just buy some cabinets for above the washer and dryer? You really don’t have to build custom ones. I just want something better than this shelf. Anything.…
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Repainting a Razor Powerwing Scooter
My wife found a pair of Razor Powerwing scooters at a garage sale for $11 each and picked them up to give to our sons on their birthdays in a couple months. Both were in good condition, but one was black and one was pink. I decided to repaint the pink scooter to avoid the…
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Today’s CNC Carving: A Chisel Rack
In today’s “new meets old” news, I’ve used my CNC router to carve a rack for my chisels. I designed the rack in Easel, Inventables’s CAD/CAM software, which only took a few minutes. The chisel holders are just circles superimposed on rectangles to allow each individual chisel to fit vertically in the rack, and the…
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Today’s CNC Carving: Doll Bunk Bed Insert
My wife and I decided that we were spending far too much money on factory-carved objects, so we bought our own CNC router — a 1000mm X-Carve from Inventables. I finished setting it up today, and the first carving on the agenda was a replacement insert for my daughter’s doll bunk bed: The bed broke…
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I made shields out of satellite dishes
I recently had occasion to remove four satellite dishes from my roof that will never be used again. My 7-year-old son asked what I was going to do with them; I said I’d probably throw them in the trash. He said, “Or you could make some shields…” So I made some shields. It turns out…
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Today’s Functional Print: Twist-In Shelf Supports
In today’s “shake it up baby” news, I’ve printed some hard-to-find twist-in shelf supports. The shelves in our new living room have vertical metal tracks that don’t just accept a push-in support clip; the support must be turned 90º in order to interlock with the track. These supports aren’t sold at any of the national…
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This is a post. It’s a post about a post.
We just moved into a new house, and the 20-year-old signpost is showing its age. It had deteriorated at the bottom, so it was no longer set in a hole and was just leaning against a tree. I decided to restore it and make use of a gift that the previous homeowners had left us.…