Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Piano Book Shelves

We’ve lived in this house for 6.5 years. For that entire time, our piano books have sat on the floor in the box that they were packed in (or scattered messily around the box.)

I decided this would be a good wood working project to tackle so I flipped through a bunch of plans and settled on the tower bookshelves from Wood Magazine, partially because I previously purchased the digital back catalog of the magazine so the plans were “free.” The plans recommend oak or maple but I thought I’d go for cherry.

The project began with a trip to Crosscut Hardwoods to buy the most expensive piece of plywood that I’ve ever purchased (though it can get much more expensive than this!) I got a 3/4″ piece of cherry plywood that was nice on both sides, a 1/4″ piece that was nice on only one side, and a 1″ thick board.

I was pretty nervous about cutting into the plywood, but I was also excited to use my new table saw with a big sheet of plywood. My old saw was too wimpy and too unsafe to do big pieces. I cut about 25″ off one end and then ran the rest through the saw. The saw ran like a champ, and combined with the assembly/outfeed table, it never felt unsafe.

After cutting some strips of hardwood and using it as edge banding on the plywood, the main joinery is done using biscuits. I’ve done a little bit of work with the biscuit joiner before but never this much. It really is simple and makes quick work of some of these bigger glue ups.

Next up was the base and the top trim pieces. Those were a little tricky as the plans recommended biscuit joints on the mitered angles to hold the joints together. That worked but I think I’d probably choose a different method next time because it took forever to get my cheapo biscuit joiner dialed in for that fancy cut. In the photo below you see a scrap piece filling in the empty back so that the band clamp can squeeze evenly all the way around.

The final construction step was to build the drawer, install the drawer slides, and then cut/attach the drawer front.

For a finish, I chose to keep it simple and went with a wipe on polyurethane. It does give a bit of a plasticy finish but that build-up is also extra protection for the books that will be sliding in and out fairly regularly. After the coats of finish were done, I put on the 1/4″ back and reinstalled the drawer.

Once we figured out where to place it in the room, I took the time to attach the top to a stud with a strap. It’s very easy to tip over and with a three year old running around, it wouldn’t take long for it to topple over.

This project was a nice way to dabble in some nicer furniture. This was about the biggest thing I can comfortably handle in my shop so I won’t be tackling a dining table anytime soon, but I’m happy I did this one.

It’s pretty easy to see the different colors of cherry woods, but I’m hopeful that as time goes on, the cherry will all darken up to the same color. But even as it is now, I’m very happy with it and admit to walking into that room just to check out the bookshelves. It’s a nice step up from the cardboard box mess on the floor.

 

benmartens April 19, 2017 Woodworking

Childhood Memories

I’m thankful to have a couple dozen good pictures from most years of my life. Elijah? He’s going to have thousands per year. What will that do to his memory of these early years? Will those pictures trigger memories earlier than what used to be normal?

I don’t remember what my “earliest” memory is, but here are some that I know happened fairly young (around 3-4 years old?). I’ll leave the psychoanalysis about why I remember these specific things up to you.

  • I walked up the stairs of our house in Michigan, and said, “Hi Mom!” Mom turned around and said, “Why Mom and not Mommy?”
  • Dad took me bowling. It was just the two of us. I don’t remember bowling but I remember driving to the bowling alley with him.
  • I pooped or peed in my underwear sufficiently long after I had given up diapers and my parents made me dip it in the toilet and clean it out. It was so gross that I never wanted to do it again.
  • I remember two neighbors from our house in Michigan. The one next door had a pool WITH STEPS IN IT! Wow. And a neighbor down the street bought a Corvette. I remember thinking, “Why did you buy such a cool car and pick a color that looks like poop?” It was that classic brown color from the 70s.

So there we go. Those are my earliest childhood memories. I wonder what Elijah’s will be? Hopefully not the motorcycle race.

benmartens April 18, 2017 Family

Best Of YouTube

Destin over at Smarter Every Day posted a great video with a guy who can talk backwards. They test him to see how different activities affect his ability to talk backwards. Destin is also the co-host of a good new podcast called No Dumb Questions.

This next recommendation is really an entire channel: The Q. These videos show how to make some fun machines with common household items. His main materials are cardboard and hot glue. For example, here’s a robotic arm made from simple syringes and cardboard.

How many do think are in Australia herding cattle with a HELICOPTER? 10? Well, according to this article, 10 of them die every year. This looks very effective… and completely crazy.

benmartens April 17, 2017 Links

Easy Shepherd’s Pie

I love shepherd’s pie, but mostly I love the idea of it because I rarely make it. The other weekend, I finally decided to look up an easy version of the recipe and I found this one from Food.com. I cheated and used packaged mashed potatoes and it worked fine. Real would be better but that’s a lot of work.

Ingredients

  • 1 lb ground beef
  • 2 cups mashed potatoes, hot (packaged will work if time is tight)
  • 4 ounces cream cheese, cubed
  • 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese, divided
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 4 cups frozen mixed vegetables, thawed
  • 1 cup beef gravy

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 375°F Brown meat in skillet and drain.
  2. Mix potatoes, cream cheese, 1/2 cup of the shredded cheese and the garlic until well blended.
  3. Stir vegetables and gravy into meat.
  4. Spoon into 9-inch square baking dish.
  5. Cover with potato mixture. Don’t worry about it being perfectly even, the more rustic it looks, the better.
  6. Sprinkle with remain 1/2 cup shredded cheese. Bake for 20 minutes or until heated through.
benmartens April 14, 2017 Food

Bacon Cheese Topped Chicken

You had me at “bacon”. (Via Taste Of Home)

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup Dijon mustard
  • 1/2 cup honey
  • 4-1/2 teaspoons canola oil, divided
  • 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • Dash paprika
  • 2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 cup (4 ounces) shredded Monterey Jack cheese
  • 1 cup (4 ounces) shredded cheddar cheese
  • 8 strips of cooked bacon
  • 2 teaspoons minced fresh parsley

Directions

  • In a small bowl, combine the mustard, honey, 1-1/2 teaspoons oil and lemon juice. Pour 1/2 cup into a large resealable plastic bag; add the chicken. Seal the bag and turn to coat; refrigerate for 2 hours. Cover and refrigerate the remaining marinade
  • Drain and discard marinade from chicken. In a large skillet over medium heat, brown chicken in remaining oil on all sides. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and paprika. Transfer to a greased 11-in. x 7-in. baking dish.
  • In the same skillet, saute mushrooms in butter until tender. Spoon reserved marinade over chicken. Top with cheeses and mushrooms. Place bacon strips in a crisscross pattern over chicken.
  • Bake, uncovered, at 375° for 20-25 minutes or until a meat thermometer reads 170°. Sprinkle with parsley.
benmartens April 13, 2017 Food

Cheesy Gnocci with Ham and Peas

We have been making some new recipes lately so for the next three days, I’ll share some of the best ones with you.

The first is a great, quick weeknight recipe and it would be a good way to use up some of those ham leftovers after Easter. (via Food Network)

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • One 8-ounce piece deli ham, diced
  • 1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
  • 1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
  • One 17.5-ounce package potato gnocchi
  • 1 cup frozen peas, thawed
  • 1/4 cup heavy cream
  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 cup shredded Swiss or Gruyere cheese

Directions

  • Preheat the broiler to high heat.
  • Melt the butter in a large ovenproof skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the ham and thyme and continue to cook until the ham is lightly browned.
  • Add the chicken broth and 3/4 cup water and bring to a simmer. Add the gnocchi, stir well, cover and cook until the gnocchi is slightly tender, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat. Uncover and stir in the peas, cream, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Sprinkle the cheese over the top and broil until golden and bubbly, about 3 minutes. Serve.
benmartens April 12, 2017 Food

AMA Supercross In Seattle

I imagine that there will be lots of times that I disappoint my son. Saturday was a huge one.

Some years, the AMA Supercross tour comes through Seattle and I’ve always wanted to go see a race. They convert Century Link field into a big dirt track and go nuts. Three years old seemed like a bit of a stretch, but I figured that Elijah and I would give it a shot. Practice started at 1pm so the plan was to buy the cheapest seats we could get, go early, and leave before the crowd got huge and raucous.

I hyped this with Elijah for weeks leading up to it. We were both incredibly excited about our planned day together while Tyla got a day to herself. On Saturday morning, I told Elijah that our day was going to be even MORE fun because we were going to ride a bus to get to the stadium. That might have trumped the motorcycles in his book. I thought I was so clever with this plan.

So we parked the truck at the Mercer Island Park and Ride. I bought my bus ticket on my phone app and we waited for the bus. It showed up and we hopped on. “Umm sir, that’s a Metro ticket.” “Yeah?” “This is Sound Transit. Different ticket.” …. I only had twenties in my wallet and the machine didn’t give change. “Oh. I’ll get off.” No problem though, right? I’ll download the Sound Transit app and buy a ticket. We’ll just get on the next bus in 15 minutes. But oops, Sound Transit doesn’t HAVE an app. There are a few bus stops with kiosks where you can buy a ticket. I was fed up with the fact that we have TWO bus systems and that I couldn’t buy a ticket for the one I wanted to ride, so we gave up on that and drove to the stadium. Elijah was disappointed but we talked about making the best of the situation.

It was a short drive to the stadium but whoa, parking was $50! Private lots a little bit farther down the road were $40. I kept driving. The normal area where we park for Mariners games had a $20 option. Ok. Fine. Whatever. We paid our money and I hoisted Elijah up on my shoulders for the one mile walk (seriously, I measured it and Google maps said 5279ft.) to the stadium. Elijah was getting pretty antsy by this time, but hey, we’re here. Time for the big payoff.

Wait… why is the stadium so empty? Why is there still earth moving equipment on the track? Shouldn’t they be practicing by now? I asked one of the stadium workers and … too much rain. Everything has been delayed until 4pm. It was 12:30pm.

Elijah had no clue and was still grinning and excited. So we walked over to the outside edge of the stadium while we watched the trains go by and I thought about what to do. In the end, I decided to just call it quits. There’s no way we could sit around for 3.5 hours with nothing to do in the cold and misty rain. I knelt down and told Elijah that the motorcycles weren’t running today.

Elijah has a few different cries. There’s the “I don’t feel good” cry and the “I’m not getting my way cry.” But the one that gets to me is the “This is really sad” cry. His lower lip starts to quiver and tears well up. It’s such a pure, innocent emotion. That’s the one I got.

Ouch.

We wiped off his tears and took a picture by the track before heading back to the truck and leaving. Disappointing Elijah so badly (twice in the span of an hour) hurt way more than the pile of money we wasted on the tickets and parking.

On the long walk back, I decided I would try to salvage the day by doing something else that might be a little special. I gave him three choices: go to an arcade, go to the McDonald’s play place, or go to church and mow the lawn. He chose… go to church and mow the lawn. That kid loves tractors! On the way there, we stopped at Dairy Queen for some ice cream and then he happily sat on my lap for over two hours while we bounced around the church yard.

I definitely feel burned by the whole experience. When I got home, I tried to figure out how I could have known about this before leaving the house. The best I came up with was that Century Link tweeted out a new schedule for the day about 30 minutes after we left the house. Not great, but it would have saved us a lot of grief.

Maybe in another year the sting will have worn off and I’ll be willing to try this adventure again with a four year old.

benmartens April 11, 2017 Family

Gift From Bob Claggett

Bob Claggett runs I Like To Make Stuff. He has weekly posts with great projects that are achievable for the common man. Those projects span woodworking, electronics, 3D printing, model making, and much more. It’s one of my favorite YouTube channels.

Bob also hosts a weekly live stream on Twitch where he works on a project and chats with people watching. It’s a fun way to interact and see what he’s working on outside of his videos. On Twitch, there is a way to send the content producer some money. It’s basically like a tip jar. On Bob’s channel, whoever puts in the most tip money during each stream gets a custom badge cut out on his laser cutter. A couple weeks ago, I was the winner. If you start watching around the 1 hour 58 minute mark, you’ll see my donation and short battle with another user who was trying to win too.

Watch live video from ILikeToMakeStuff on www.twitch.tv

And then the video concludes with him cutting out my custom badge. It arrived a few days later with some extra swag thrown in. Thanks Bob!

For the curious, that donation only amounts to $20. I figure if I was in the Atlanta area, I’d be happy to buy him a 12 pack of beer for all the knowledge he’s given me so I just did it virtually.

benmartens April 10, 2017 Maker

SimpliSafe Review

(This post will probably make more sense if you read part 1 from yesterday.)

Before I start talking about our new system, let me back up and explain what I want out of our home security system in order from most important to least important.

  1. If there’s a fire, get the fire department there as soon as possible whether I’m home or not.
  2. If someone tries to get in while we are home, I want to know immediately to have a little extra time to react and get the police headed in our direction. (In my dreams, the police pull up just as I’m throwing the bad guy onto the lawn and holding him there with a shotgun to the back of the head.)
  3. If someone breaks in while we are gone, at least we’ll know about it. This is probably the most common reason people buy a system, and while I like the feature, it’s not a huge selling point for me. Frankly, we live in a very undesirable theft target. If you’re crazy/smart enough to break into our house, you’re going to do whatever you want regardless of whether I have an alarm system installed.

Ok so back to my quest to dump my landline ($55/month) and replace my landline monitoring ($10/month) with cellular monitoring…

I chose SimpliSafe. They’ve target my exact scenario and they’ve been around for long enough that I trust them to provide me with a good product.

The setup process is extremely simple:

  1. Create your system by figuring out how many of each type of sensor you want. I recommend that you start small because it’s really easy to add more later and the only additional cost is that you pay shipping each time you make an order.
  2. SimpliSafe will configure your new base station for the sensors you ordered and ship you a box.
  3. They say that setup takes 30 minutes and they’re right (depending on how many sensors you bought.) Setup is SOOOOO easy compared to what I went through before! Basically, you plug the base station into the wall, activate your account online and stick your keypad on the wall. For each sensor, remove the tag to connect the included battery and stick it on the wall.

You’re done!

Unfortunately, my case wasn’t quite that simple. My base station came with a T-Mobile SIM card in it and the T-Mobile signal was so bad that I could only rarely get a connection from a single point in my house. After a lot of trial and error, SimpliSafe agreed to send me a replacement board for the base station that uses Verizon’s network instead of T-Mobile. That worked a lot better.

Our monitoring is now $15/month but we dropped $55/month for the home phone and $10/month for our old monitoring company. So we are saving $50/month! We’ll recoup the ~$400 hardware cost in 8 months.

I love these projects that cut out huge monthly bills! It’s much more fun to spend money when you know that you’re going to save that much in a short amount of time.

I also feel good using an alarm system that is easy to expand and modify whenever I want. I suppose there’s a chance that it’s less secure than my old system, but remember my priority list. I’m ok with that. I also don’t have any evidence that it IS less secure. My old system had plenty of wireless sensors and the landline was very easy to cut. A determined and intelligent burgler is going to know how to get through most consumer grade alarm systems anyway. The trick is to just be a more uninviting target than other people in your neighborhood. It’s kind of like hiking in bear country with somebody that runs more slowly than you.

benmartens April 7, 2017 Home Improvement

Custom Alarm System

There is one major home improvement project that I’ve written very little about. Soon after we moved in, I went down a month long rabbit hole of learning about DIY alarm systems. The idea is basically to install the same level of hardware that a company like ADT would install, but skip the middleman. You install the hardware and you connect it to a monitoring company. We paid about $500 for the hardware and then $10/month for the monitoring. I wasn’t comfortable sharing the details of it in the beginning because I wasn’t sure how secure it was. That concern was probably unwarranted.

Our GE Concord 4 system worked flawlessly, but it was one of the hardest projects I’ve done. The hardware itself is relatively simple. All the sensors have two wires and they are either normally open or normally closed. The wireless sensors are easier to setup and just need to be paired with the base station. The catch is that the main circuit boards for these units are 1980s-90s technology. Forget connecting your computer to it and configure it. Instead you have to type incredibly long series of numbers into the keypad to change settings. For example, if you want to change a setting, you press 8, your four digit master system code, 0, 0, and the four digit code to select the right program setting. Then you actually get to make the setting which is usually a one digit number (on/off, number of seconds, etc.) The installation manual is 113 pages long. It’s intense.

But you know what? I’m still glad I did it, partially because I learned something that was really complex and because it saved us a LOT of money both on the initial hardware purchase and on the monthly monitoring. We have easily saved thousands of dollars compared to using a standard consumer alarm system.

But.

I’m getting tired of having a landline just for the alarm system. It wasn’t so bad when we moved in because our cell phones would regularly drop calls. Coverage and phones have improved and that’s no longer a problem. So the phone line really is just for the alarm. And no, you can’t use a VOIP line (like Comcast phone service) for an alarm. It has to be the old-fashioned POTS phone line.

Well the good news is that since I custom installed my own hardware, I’m free to switch over to cellular monitoring and switch to a different monitoring company if I want to. The problem is that I REALLY don’t want to go down that rabbit hole again. I started looking into it and it’s pretty complex and the technology is frustratingly ancient. I’m sure it would work, but I don’t have the patience.

Thankfully, a number of companies have stepped up to offer DIY home security products. You get the benefits of cutting out the middleman without the headache. This post is getting long so I’ll keep you in suspense until tomorrow about what we’re using now and how we like it.

benmartens April 6, 2017 Home Improvement