Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Chest of Drawers

Most of my projects wouldn’t qualify as “fine woodworking”. I use screws to put things together and there isn’t much fancy joinery. Last fall, I set out to create an heirloom quality dresser that Elijah could theoretically keep for life.

Marc Spagnuolo is probably the godfather of YouTube woodworking videos. He’s been doing it for a long time and he offers paid videos which walk through complex projects in an incredible level of detail. For example, this project had five and a half hours of video along with a Sketchup model and cut list.

After a wallet-deflating trip to the hardwood dealer to get the supplies, I carefully set off on my adventure, and what an adventure it was. I knew it would be a challenge but it seemed like I had to learn a new skill at every step. I would hem and haw and think about it and the whole project stretched out for month and months.

But I’m happy to report that about a year later, I’ve finally finished! When I look at it, I see a hundred flaws, but I’m still proud of it. The major issue right now is that the finish I used still smells too much to put clothes inside so I’m going to let it sit for about a month to hopefully get the smell completely gone before we start using it. If it still smells then I’ll probably apply a coat of shellac to the drawers at least to seal them a bit more.

Because people have already asked how much this project cost and some have half/mostly joked about me making another one for them, let me share the rough estimates:

  • Wood: $600
  • Finish: $100
  • Drawer Pulls: $50

So we’re at $750 before any labor and it was an enormous amount of labor for a dad/husband hobbyist woodworker. I’m not building another one. This was my marathon and I’m done.

Along the way I also tried shooting some video and I’ll be editing that together. It’s not going to be any kind of viral hit, but I thought it would be fun to put it on an SD card and tape it to the back of the dresser for him to find at some point down the road.

But for now, I’m very excited to move on to new projects!

benmartens September 28, 2020 Woodworking

Running Recap

Back in early July I set a goal of running once a week for three weeks. I did that and kept going at a leisurely “once a week” pace for nine weeks. It was fun to see how rapidly my pace increased. My best two miles was 9:08/mile. That distance and pace aren’t going to win any races but I was proud of it.

The other goal I’ve always had was to finally run that 8 minute mile that our freshman baseball coach tried to make us run. I succeeded in that and ran a 7:45 mile.

So I’m stopping for now. I never enjoyed it and I don’t want to put money into rain/cold running gear or the time into figuring out how to work around the lack of sunshine. I could see starting it up again next summer and maybe even training for a 5k but for now I’m done. I realize this isn’t a dud of a post but I felt guilty quitting without announcing it since I wrote a post before saying that I was starting.

Kudos to all you runners out there. I now have a better understanding of what you do!

benmartens September 16, 2020 Sports

Happy Birthday To Me

This is it. The big 4-0. I wasn’t going to post anything because what do you say at this point, but then I remembered when my dad turned 40. He had a birthday right around the same time as Pastor Hintz and they were born in the same year. Dad helped plan a surprise party for Pastor at our house and then when Pastor arrived, it was a double surprise because while he wasn’t looking, a sign was put up that said “Happy birthday Pastor and Dallon“. Kudos to my mom and Mrs. Hintz who I assume were the masterminds behind that idea.

benmartens September 12, 2020 Family

Google Pixel 4a Review

If you look through my history of cell phones, you’ll see that that my last purchase was a Samsung S7 in October of 2016. That was our first Android phone and I went for a top of the line experience. I wanted to see the best of Android as I switched platforms.

Fast forward almost FOUR YEARS and those phones are still chugging along, but they’re getting pretty sluggish and the batteries are annoyingly week. By lunch time I’m lucky to have a 30-40% charge. Last fall when we hit the three year point, I decided to push the purchase out a bit longer and wait for the Pixel 4a. That announcement usually happens in May but COVID. Yada yada yada, we finally got our new phones! After having them for a couple weeks, here are some thoughts:

Pros

  • Google gave us $58 each for our old S7’s. That brought the total with tax to $636.44 for two phones. That’s less than we paid for one of the S7’s. With many flagship phones over $1000, I’m ready to give a mid-range phone a chance and see how that goes. If we got 4 years out of a flagship and we get 2 years out of these, I’ll be happy and ready to upgrade.
  • The camera is gorgeous. I don’t have experience with other modern phones, but the reviews seem to indicate that this is a really solid camera. The Night Sight feature is incredible and really does work as well as the reviews say.
  • The phone doesn’t have expandable storage, but it comes with 128GB. We were living with 32GB internal + 64 SD storage on our own phones and never came close to filling that up so I expect this will be fine for us.
  • MORE POWER! While I’m sure a flagship phone would still trounce the 4a, these are way faster than the S7. For example, I’ve been playing with some autonomous drone software (Dronelink) and it didn’t work at all with the S7. It’s not flawless with the 4a but it’s plenty good. And when Elijah and I play Mario Kart Tour together, I don’t have to think about how his cheapo tablet is so much faster than my phone. Android Auto in my truck is much snappier too.

Cons

  • There’s no water resistance rating on these phones. While we’re careful and wouldn’t expect to take our phones into a pool, it’s nice to not worry about the phone if you’re out in a drizzle.
  • I really loved the wireless charging on my S7. I used it a lot especially as my battery was dying off. I can’t imagine that’s a super expensive part given that the tech has been around for so long, but they left it out of the 4a.
  • The screens are only 1080p. I did enjoy the WQHD (2560 × 1440) resolution on the S7’s but most of the time I don’t notice.

All in all we’re thrilled with these new phones. They’re so much faster than our old ones and the photos are amazing. They’re a perfect fit for us and since they were on the cheaper end of the phone spectrum, I won’t feel as bad about replacing them in a couple years when (hopefully) 5g is more prevalent.

benmartens September 9, 2020 Gadgets

Homecoming by Jon Schmidt

I’m still chugging my way through this piano book by Jon Schmidt. The latest one I learned was Homecoming (Spotify link). I decided to just record this one at home instead of doing it on the nicer piano at church. I plugged an audio recorder into the headphone jack on the piano and that worked well, but I couldn’t get a good camera angle so it’s more obvious when I change splice two clips together to take out my page turn.

benmartens September 8, 2020 Commentary, Music

Come To Church With Me?

Have I ever invited you to come to church with me? If not, now is a super easy time for you to accept the invitation. Throughout the lockdown, I’ve been working with Pastor and our organists to post full service videos every Sunday morning at 8am.

Our church follows a standard liturgy (order of events) for each service and sometimes it can be tricky to know where we are in the hymnal, but with the online videos, everything you need to know is right on the screen. We even include the pre and post service music from our organists.

By the way, wonder WHY we use a liturgy? There are a few reasons, but one is that even if the Pastor were to give a total dud of a sermon (which would hopefully result in a chat from the elders!), we’d still cover key parts of the service like confession and absolution along with a pre-planned/organized series of readings and prayers.

Here’s a direct link to our playlist of full services on YouTube or you can find them on our Facebook page too. Or if you just want something embedded here, check out this service which talks about how faith grows in our hearts. If you watch any of these and have questions, I’d love to chat with you.

benmartens September 7, 2020 Commentary

They’ll Never Believe Me

I don’t remember the source, but recently I heard some people talking about totally absurd things that happened in their lives. Things where people would struggle to believe it if they weren’t there. I came up with quite a few but here are three of my favorites:

Up the Middle
I spent a lot of my time on the baseball field on the pitcher’s mound. While pitching, one of the scariest (in retrospect) parts was the line drive rocketing back at me faster than I threw it. If you do the math, there’s less than half a second from the time a pitcher releases the ball until it reaches home plate and makes the return trip. It hurts. A lot. I feel like I remember every ball that came back at me but one from high school stands out. It was all I could do to spin out of the way in what I’m sure was a very undignified manner, but once I realized I wasn’t broken, I looked out towards center field to see where it had ended up. But nobody was moving… why were they cheering instead of chasing the ball? One of them pointed at my glove and when I looked down, there it was! As I had spun to the left, my left hand went behind my back and the ball not only hit my glove, but lodged itself in and stayed there. That’s one out, the scary lucky way.

One Down, One Million to Go
When we were kids, Dad built us an amazing treehouse. Over the years, the squirrels got a lot of use out of it. The siding on the treehouse was a smorgasbord for them. From my bedroom window, Google Maps says it was 65 feet to the treehouse. One of my windows didn’t have a screen on it and Dad gave me permission to open it up and shoot squirrels from my room with my BB gun. I could usually scare them enough to make them leave but nothing more than that. One morning, as usual, I spooked one enough that it headed back towards the woods. I quickly put another pellet into my gun, pumped it 10 times and fired as the squirrel was on a dead run across the yard, 85 feet away. My mouth dropped in amazement when the squirrel did a somersault and didn’t get up. I ran to tell Dad and he gave me a .410 to go make sure it was dead. It turns out I didn’t even need the shotgun because I had sent the pellet right through its tiny little skull.

The Kickball Shot
I don’t remember what grade I was in, at some point in grade school, I was walking across the parking lot during recess with the kickball. Someone behind me asked if they could have it. I said sure and instead of turning around nicely and rolling it to them, I punted it backward over my head as I was walking away. I turned around to see where it landed and to our collective surprise, it flew directly over the backboard of the hoop that was probably 20-30 feet behind me and swished through. These were big kickballs so making a basket at all was difficult. Doing it from that far away accidentally with a kick backwards over your head? I could try for the rest of my life and never repeat that.

benmartens August 27, 2020 Commentary

Dronelink

One reason DJI sells the Mavic Mini for less than its other drones is that it doesn’t have as many autonomous features. However, they recently published an SDK do a number of 3rd party companies have added the Mavic Mini to the list of drones that can be controlled by their existing software. I ended up paying $20 for a hobbyist license to Dronelink. The price was low enough that it seemed like it was worth a try.

The main customer of the software seems to be companies who need to get aerial photos of buildings, bridges, etc but they don’t have a stable full of expert drone pilots who can quickly get the shot perfectly every time. With the software, the route planning can be done completely from a website and then executed via a phone app connected to the controller. You can also create simpler programs out in the field directly from the phone.

My old S7 was woefully underpowered and while it would run the software, the drone had barely taken off before it complained about the lag and refused to continue. My new Pixel 4a does a much better job but for a complex curving route where the gimble is constantly adjusting to keep pointed at a specific object, there are noticeable glitches. For simple routes, it seems to do a good job.

Here’s an example of a “trucking shot”. Imagine someone driving along in a truck with a camera pointed out the side. I didn’t make a perfectly straight path so you can see some points where it turns but overall, there isn’t stuttering to the movement.

Now here’s an image of a more complicated route followed by the video that resulted.

You can see the stuttering as my phone tries to chug through all the commands in real-time. I suspect that if I had one of the flagship phones, that stuttering would go away.

For $20, I’m still happy with this purchase. I want to try to plan out a route that is simple enough to capture smoothly and then run it every week or so and try to stitch it together into a timelapse after the construction is complete. I’m guessing I won’t be successful but I suspect I’ll learn a lot in the process.

benmartens August 26, 2020 Gadgets, Geek

Deception Pass Camping

Last weekend was our second camping trip of the summer. I was a little nervous going into the weekend because it looked a bit wet, but if it had to rain, it worked out perfectly. It rained Friday night but didn’t start until around 10:30pm and stopped before we got up. It was wet when we woke up Sunday morning too, but other than giving us a messy tent to clean when we got home, it didn’t impact our plans at all.

This was a pre-COVID-planned trip with Tim, Chelsea and the girls. It’s hard to believe that it has been over 9 years since our last camping trip with them! Our two families have added three kids since then.

Since then, Tim and Chelsea’s have also added a fantastic new camper. We’re still rocking the Cabela’s tent but it was good to us yet again. It rained quite a bit on Friday night but we stayed dry. 5 stars. Would recommend. I also recommend camping in a site next to someone with a camper. Ha!

We headed to the beach early on Saturday and then left when it started getting too busy for our liking. We spent the rest of the time talking by the fire and enjoying delicious food.

Camping can be a lot of work, but I’m so thankful for these trips. It feels like a responsible way to stay within the current guidelines, socialize with a small group outside, and get away from the house. We’re already thinking about what to book for next year and wishing we had more land to park a camper on.

benmartens August 25, 2020 Outdoors