Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Tax Season

Tyla and I are done with our taxes for 2016. This was our 11th year getting our taxes done by the same tax pro. I realized that I’ve never blogged about her so I figured I’d give her a plug this year.

We use H&R Block. I always feel inclined to defend that because we all know that many of the people at these tax preparation employees are not trained much better than you or I would be if we had a tax application on our computer. The very first year I moved here, I had a very complicated return so I decided to give H&R Block a try. Hearing that it was going to be complex, they scheduled me with their “best tax professional.” I would later find out that her name is Kelly Hall and she has not only been doing this for more than 25 years, but she also does a lot of the training in this part of the country.

Each year she happily plows through my mountain of paperwork in a one hour appointment. Along the way, she provides me with a wealth of suggestions of ways to save more money next year and tells me which kinds of records to keep to claim various deductions. Many of the years she even catches errors in the tax forms that I receive.

I walk out smiling because it only took one hour and because I’m confident that they were done right. I’m not leaving money on the table. There’s no way to prove this, but I’m sure that a lot of the money I pay in preparation fees is recovered by the additional ways she finds to save me money.

I also walk out thinking, “She made that look so easy. I should just use this as a model and do it myself next year.” And then inevitably there is some new complexity in my finances and I’m thankful to know that Kelly can take care of it for me.

The cost of tax preparation varies widely depending on the complexity of your taxes. Ours are fairly complex and we end up paying around $340. I have great respect for the many of you that I know do your own taxes. I’ve done my own before too and it makes me stress out too much for fear that I’m doing it wrong or missing large amounts of deductions. I’ve learned that paying the tax preparation bill is less painful than doing it myself. If your ratio works the other way then kudos to you!

If you want to try H&R Block for the first time, let me know. I have a referral coupon that will get us both some money.

P.S. Ok, since we’re talking about federal taxes, I also can’t resist urging you to make sure you understand how much money you actually paid in taxes. I’m not talking about the money the government might be returning to you, but the actual money that was withheld and kept by the government. If you know what you paid, at least you’ll be making more of an educated choice the next time you make a vote related to taxes. I would wager that 90% of our population has no idea how much they pay in income taxes.

benmartens March 8, 2017 Commentary

Cut PVC With String

One of the nice things about helping to install my irrigation system is that I feel confident enough to make repairs or modifications on my own. But I recently learned that I’ve been doing part of it the (very) hard way.

Most changes require cutting a pipe that’s already in the ground. To do that, I dig a big enough hole that I can get a hand saw or a sawzall in there. All I really needed to do was get down to the pipe with a big enough hole that dirt won’t get into the open ends and then use mason’s line to cut the pipe.

benmartens March 7, 2017 Home Improvement

Filling The Garden Boxes

The garden box project is done and ready for sunshine. Elijah and I got a load half dirt, half compost) from Pacific Topsoils and filled the boxes. It took about 1.3 yards to fill the beds and thankfully they are generous with their loads there so my 1 yard purchase was perfect.

I made a timelapse of the build and filling the beds. It’s fun to watch the truck rise up as we unloaded. The unloading was very easy since I could back right up to the boxes. Elijah was having a BLAST helping with that part. It’s so nice to have my own truck to get these kinds of jobs done!

benmartens March 6, 2017 Home Improvement

Tractor Sign

For Dad’s birthday, I spent time drawing a picture of his tractor. It might take a lot of hours to get to the point where you have your file ready to cut, but after you get there, it’s just minutes to cut a new copy.

I decided to cut out a big one and put it on Elijah’s wall. The max work piece size that our laser cutter can handle is 24 x 18 so that’s about how big this one is. I sprayed on a couple coats of white paint but still let the wood grain show through. As you can see in the picture, he was VERY excited to put this on his wall.

benmartens March 3, 2017 Maker

Laser Cutting At Home

I’m very thankful that I can use a laser cutter at work, but what are the options for laser cutting at home? There are three very easy and low cost options to start with:

  1. Check with your local library. More and more libraries are supplying laser cutters and 3D printers for people to use.
  2. Order it from a website. I’ve done this for 3D prints before but the same concept applies to laser cutting. The turnaround time is slower and you pay for shipping, but it’s a lot cheaper than buying a machine!
  3. Find a local maker space. These are generally clubs that you can join and use their equipment. You pay a membership fee or you pay to rent time on a machine, but doing it this way helps you iterate faster than doing it by mail.

If you still want to buy one for home use, you should probably be getting advice from someone more knowledgeable than me, but here’s what I know. If you buy an entry level system from a company like Epilog or Universal, expect to pay upwards of $8000, and that might not include ventilation which is almost a requirement.

A company called Glowforge is making a lot of waves in the maker community because they are coming to market with a laser cutter intended for home hobby use. It has a lot of really nice features that lower the barrier to entry, and you can get their basic model with ventilation for under $4000. Reviews of pre-production units are very positive. The cost of ongoing maintenance remains to be seen.

It’s a great time to be a maker!

benmartens March 2, 2017 Maker

SmartThings Plus Ecobee

Last December, I wrote about how I had done some programming on our new SmartThings hub to automate our home a bit. My favorite customization is that our thermostat automatically turns down when both Tyla and I are away from the house (based on the location of our phones) and then automatically turns back up when we return. It occurs to me that I should probably disable that when we hire a babysitter and both leave for the evening.

It all works smoothly, but using the default APIs available with the SmartThings, I can only tell the thermostat to go to a specific temperature when we return. I can’t say “resume your normal program” which is what I really want since the thermostat automatically turns down a bit at night. I suppose I could program all that in the SmartThings hub too but it seems like overkill when the thermostat already can do that on it’s own.

So to avoid that overkill… I spent a couple hours figuring out how to make my SmartThings application authenticate with the Ecobee API and call a “resume program” method there. Basically I wanted to see how hard it was to call into the detailed API for a specific device when I hit a limit in the generic API provided by SmartThings. Turns out, it wasn’t too bad.

I continue to be happy with this SmartThings hub and would recommend it, especially if you’re a programming nerd who likes to tinker. It’s a fun little sandbox and all this code is probably saving me some money on our heating bill.

benmartens March 1, 2017 Gadgets

New Crosscut Sled

I’ve written before about making a crosscut sled for the table saw. I used the first one so much that it kind of wore out and I had ideas for improvements so I made another. They’re incredibly convenient especially for the smaller toy projects that I was doing. It’s a very safe and precise way to cut small pieces (among other things.)

My new table saw had miter slots that were a different width so I needed to build another sled. This time I incorporated some t-track and a flip stop that slides in that track. This allows me to get repeatable cuts with the stop but I can also flip it up after I set the position of the piece to avoid any binding between the blade and the stop.

The process was pretty much the same as previous builds, but because I had a much more precise saw, I decided to spend extra time squaring up the fence to get perfect 90 degree cuts.

I used my big square to get it initially set close to 90 and then did the 5 cut test to see how far off I was. Watch that link to see it in action, but basically you make a cut, rotate the piece, make a cut, rotate, etc. You do that 5 times and then you measure the width of the last slice at the top and the bottom. That helps you calculate how much out of square your sled is because it really magnifies the error. I was so far off that it was plainly visible to the naked eye. How could that be when my square said I was spot on? I futzed with it for quite a while and then got frustrated and walked away. During my break, I realized that the only explanation was that my square wasn’t square. Indeed it wasn’t! So I changed up my method of dialing it in and got it to a point where over a 40″ cut, I only deviate by 0.001″ from being perfectly square. That’s insanely perfect. In fact, it’s so good that I suspect I’m within the margin of error for my setup and my measuring tools. Plenty good enough for me.

benmartens February 28, 2017 Maker, Woodworking

40 Years

Yesterday was Dad and Mom’s 40th anniversary! Congratulations! They’ve been supportive as parents and been a great example of a loving marriage for us to follow.

It feels a little silly to give someone a hunk of wood as a gift after forty years of effort, but that’s what I did. I took one of the pictures from their honeymoon in Jamaica and transferred it onto a piece of pine. To do the transfer, I took a sheet of blank address labels that you run through your printer and I peeled off all the labels so I was left with the waxy surface. I printed with my inkjet printer right onto that waxy surface and then carefully pressed it onto the wood. Through trial and error I learned that you really need to give it a good rub to transfer the ink. Steve Ramsey has a good video about this process. If you’re smarter than me, you’ll remember to flip the image in your photo editing software before doing this.

I finished it off with a couple coats of spray lacquer to protect it a little and then made a support so it would stand up kind of like a photo frame.

benmartens February 27, 2017 Maker, Woodworking

Garden Boxes

A couple of our neighbors have pretty successful raised garden beds, and this year, Tyla and I decided to jump on the bandwagon. There’s a natural spot for them where the cherry trees used to be beside our driveway. It’s even plumbed for drip irrigation already.

This was the first time I’d ever built boxes like this but I used our next door neighbors for inspiration. It’s basically two 2×8 boards stacked on stop of each other with 4x4s as the corner. I dug down to level the boxes out and then pounded 4x4s into the ground to keep the boxes in place. The ground was very soggy so all of that was pretty simple. The hardest part was just keeping the box aligned correctly. It was rainy pretty hard for most of my project so I skipped a lot of the steps that probably would have saved me time like staking a line to help keep everything straight. Elijah thought it was a pretty fun project and helped for a bit before it got too wet and he went inside. He was the smart one because I ended up soaking wet. I finished them off with 1x4s around the top partially to hide my mistakes and also as a place to set tools and sit down while weeding.

I used cheap pine for this. I didn’t want anything treated since I’m not sure that is food safe. I should have probably used cedar but that was about $250 extra and I wasn’t willing to pour that much money in. We’ll let these go for 5-10 years until they rot and by then I bet I’ll have other ideas anyway.

The next step is getting the drip irrigation plumbed to the right spots and then filling the boxes with dirt.

benmartens February 24, 2017 Home Improvement

Elijah’s Box

Home Depot has Saturday morning projects targeted at kids. I thought I’d try to take Elijah to one since he likes to work with me in the shop.

The project was a photo box which I realized would make a perfect Valentine’s Day gift from Elijah to Tyla. I obviously helped him a lot, but he did do a lot of the hammering and decoration by himself and I tried very hard to restrain myself and let it look like a 3 year old made it.

We motored through it pretty quickly but he still lost interest toward the end. I think we’ll wait a little longer before trying another one, but he was very proud of what he had made and was excited to give it to Tyla on Valentine’s Day.

benmartens February 23, 2017 Family