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Today’s CNC Carving: A towel rack that says Towels
What do you hang your towels on? A plain old towel bar? Ha. A hook on the back of the door? Sad. You drape them over the shoulders of a mannequin like a cape? Ok that’s pretty cool. But what would be even cooler would be to hang your towels on a towel rack that…
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Activity Book: An Alexa skill for bored kids
Do you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device? Do you have children? Are those children ever bored? If your answers were “yes,” “yes,” and “yes of course all the time,” then do I have an Alexa skill for you! It’s called Activity Book. Enable the skill in your Alexa app (or by saying, “Alexa, enable the…
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Garbage Can Cabinet Medallions
Ever since I built our garbage and recycling cabinet last year, visitors to my home have been mystified as to where to throw away their trash, so I made some identifying medallions for the front of the cabinet with my X-Carve. They’re carved out of red oak (the same wood used for the top of…
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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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Share an iPhoto Library on the Web with WordPress
I recently needed to publish the contents of an iPhoto library online, so I wrote a script that converts the library to a WordPress site using WordPress’s REST API. The script is available in my iPhoto-WordPress-Export repository on GitHub. Check it out, and then run it like this: $ ./iphoto2wordpress.php –library=/path/to/photo/library –wordpress=https://www.example.com/ After prompting for a…
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Putting 1940s Kodachrome Slides on the Web
When my wife Christina and I were cleaning out her late father’s garage, we came across two cases of Kodachrome slides that included nighttime shots of downtown Minneapolis in the 1940s and 1950s, pictures of daily life in nearby Hutchinson, Minnesota, and some World War II photographs, like this one of a group of soldiers…
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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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Refinishing is Better Than Restarting
I’ve been busy with projects lately, but most of them are just cleaning up furniture that my wife Christina found at garage sales. Here’s a summary of all of my refinishings over the last few months. Christina found this rolling wooden cart at a garage sale, and I refreshed the finish on the top and…
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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…