Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Grizzly Bandsaw Riser Block Kit

Keeping up with the theme from yesterday, I realized that I haven’t written about the riser block kit for my bandsaw. I got the Grizzly bandsaw 1.5 years ago and have really enjoyed it. It gets used most often for curvy cuts and resawing thick stock.

I never really felt like I had the hang of resawing thick boards. I always got a lot of blade drift and I’d just try to free hand it to compensate for the drift. It sort of work, but I wasted a lot of material with wavy cuts.

For Christmas, Dad and Mom got me a riser block kit for the saw. The stock configuration gives you about a 5 3/4″ capacity but the riser block kit doubles that. I don’t usually work with 11″ boards, but I do regularly have 6 and 7″ boards so this is very handy. Getting the kit also meant that I had to get rid of my old blades and buy longer ones. I had learned a little more about blades by this point so I bought some nicer Timber Wolf blades. I have one for resawing and one for cutting smaller curves. I don’t know whether I have it all tweaked better this time or if the blade made all the difference, but wow, resawing with this thing is incredible! I can just set the fence to the thickness I want and watch the saw plow through. It has no problems going through 8″ of hard maple and when I’m done, I have a pretty smooth and straight cut. It means I no longer fret too much if I have to resaw a 1″ board into two 3/8″ boards. I know I can nail the cut right on the money.

P.S. If you follow my woodworking account on Instagram, you’d have already seen this picture.  @martenswoodworks

benmartens May 9, 2017 Woodworking

Grizzly Table Saw Three Month Update

As you already surmised from the title of this post, I’ve had my new table saw (a Grizzly G1023RLW) for three months. It was a huge splurge and way more than I needed, so I was curious how I’d feel after a few months. Would I regret going big?

No way. I LOVE this saw! It’s dead accurate, or at least better than I can measure and it has gobs of power. I’ve plowed lots of different pieces of wood through it and I’ve never heard the motor change pitch. It just laughs and says, “Is that all you’ve got?” I thought I finally got it to bog down with a 2.25″ piece of walnut, but it turned out that my fence was a little bit out of alignment so I was getting a small pinch (yikes!) That was easily adjusted and the saw resumed it’s monotonous sawdust making.

I’d buy this saw again in a heartbeat. That’s a relief because I have a nasty habit of getting bored with a hobby about the time that I finally spend money on a really nice piece of equipment for it. With RC planes, I fizzled out around the time I bought a Spektrum Dx6 transmitter. With skiing, I slowed way down right after I bought brand new, high end skis. Was the same thing going to happen with the table saw? So far, the answer is no. I’ve been amazed at just how many nights I’ve used the saw and there’s no end in site for all the projects I want to build.

Maybe this is the hobby that sticks with me?

benmartens May 8, 2017 Woodworking

Android Emulator

There are millions of apps for Android, and some of them are so useful that I think they’d even be nice to have on my desktop. It turns out, that’s not an impossible task. There are a number of Android emulators.

I searched around for a while and settled on BlueStacks because it was free and generally rated well. Once you get it installed, it basically launches a tablet in a window. You can connect to the Google Play Store (or Amazon Underground) and install apps just like you would on your device.

There are a few drawbacks though:

  1. It feels weird to use a mouse instead of a finger. Most apps are ok, but forget about it if you require two fingers at a time.
  2. It’s an older version of Android so more modern stuff might not work.
  3. This is probably burying the lead, but I fired it up when I wrote this post and it immediately blue screened my machine. I had been using it fine about a month ago so I don’t know what happened.

The bottom line is that if you’re doing reviews of apps or have some very specific need for running an Android app on your computer then yes, it’s possible. But otherwise, it’s probably more frustration than you want to deal with.

benmartens May 5, 2017 Geek

Goodbye Red Hook

Say it ain’t so! The Seattle Times reported yesterday that Red Hook is packing up their kegs and leaving Woodinville. Apparently Red Hook is selling less beer than it used to and the Woodinville site has been operating at 30% capacity. They are adding on to a brewery down in Portland so there’s no need to keep this site open anymore.

I’m personally sad to see them go. While their beer is very popular (which means somewhat generic), I really enjoy having them close by. They were a great dinner location and their tour was a great activity with out-of-town guests. The article says that they are opening a brew pub over in Seattle so I feel like this Woodinville location will probably be closing.

The site will be sold to another buyer, and with a hundreds of up-and-coming breweries in the area, I don’t expect it will be difficult to sell. It’s a big facility for those smaller guys but maybe a couple of them will band together or something along those lines.

Goodbye Red Hook! I still love you but I’ll probably never make it across the lake to your new location.

benmartens May 4, 2017 Commentary

Lots o’ Legos

In on of my recent Best of YouTube posts, I mentioned a user named JANGBRICKS, but I think he deserves his own post. His real name is Bamidele, but he goes by the name JANG which stands for “Just a Nice Guy.”

Elijah likes to watch his Lego videos, but he has lots of other collections like Playmobil, Halo stuff, and knives. I don’t know where all his money comes from, but he worked for PayPal and EduSoft in the past.

Regardless of how he does it, his Lego collection is enormous. In a recent video, he mentioned that he has about 500,000 pieces that came from buying Lego setes and a couple tens of thousands more from custom orders. If you figure an average price of $0.10/piece, that’s a big investment, but honestly, it’s not as much as I thought when I saw his setup.

On his YouTube channel, he reviews all (?) the new Lego sets and he also shows custom builds that he does for his big city. He states many places that Lego does not sponsor him at all and everything is bought with his own money. His custom builds are a treat to watch. He’s a magician with Legos.

If you enjoy Legos, this is a great channel to subscribe to.

benmartens May 3, 2017 Links

Azure Growth

I work on the Azure team. It’s one of the hottest areas in the whole company because it’s growing at an unbelievable rate. That leads to a lot of really interesting problems that keep life interesting. The chart below is a little old but it gives you a good idea at the rate of acceleration.

The future looks bright. There’s enormous room for growth even with heavy competition between Azure and Amazon Web Services. It appears that it’s raining money and the major cloud computing competitors are just trying to build enough buckets to catch it all.

benmartens May 2, 2017 Commentary

Best Of YouTube

This first video is actually two videos. Sneaky. The one embedded below is a series of physics riddles. Watch it first and think about your answers. Once you feel good about your answers, what this video to see the actual answers. I only got two right (and one was little more than a lucky guess.)

Mark Rober is the world’s most awesome uncle and he’s done it again with an awesome Hot Wheels video. Elijah loves his Hot Wheels track and I want to show this to him, but I don’t think he’ll understand that it’s not totally real. He’ll spend the next month asking me for enough track to fill up our whole house.

And finally, I’ve never thought about how ravioli noodles are made, but now that I’ve seen it done, it seems like it could be a fun project. I’ll add this to the list of things to build if I ever get a lathe.

benmartens May 1, 2017 Links, Video

Picture Frame Jig

Picture frames are four pieces of wood stuck together. How hard can that be?

Very.

Getting those corners to match up perfectly, have all four corners be exactly 90 degrees and have those joints be strong is not easy to achieve without some help. My next project involves making a picture frame so I decided to take some time and make a couple jigs.

The first step is to make the main picture frame jig. Thankfully the interwebz are full of ideas, and I chose David Picciuto’s jig. He has a nice video describing how to make it, but my quick summary is: “It works!” I did a quick test with some scrap wood and the glue up went perfectly.

Next I’ll work on making his spline jig to reinforce the corners.

benmartens April 28, 2017 Woodworking

Sleepwalking Stories

I’m a sleepwalker. I don’t remember when it started, but I haven’t grown out of it yet. Over the years, it has created quite a few interesting stories. Most of the time it just results in my pillow and/or sheets ending in a weird place or me walking around the room mumbling, but there were a couple times that it was quite a bit more involved:

The first one happened freshman year of college. I was at dinner with a bunch of guys from the floor and one of them said, “Hey Ben, thanks for yelling at Sarah last night.” I don’t remember if her name was really Sarah, but we’ll call her that for this story. It was the girlfriend of a guy on the floor and she was a VERY loud talker. My roommate started laughing when I looked confused and said, “Huh?” “You don’t remember?” My roommate filled in the missing details. Apparently the escapade had started with me getting out of bed in the middle of the night. That’s no small feat. We had loft beds. The only way to get up was to do a pull up on the cross bar and hoist yourself up. Getting down was the reverse: grab the cross bar and swing down to the ground. So I swung down in my sleep, unlocked the door, stuck my head out in the hall way and yelled, “BE QUIET! IT’S QUIET HOURS!” Then I walked back in the room, pulled myself up to bed and went back to sleep (except I was sleeping the whole time so I don’t know what you call it.)

The second one that sticks out was also in college. We were on a ski trip in Michigan. It was a big group but I only knew one or two of the guys there. We were all sleeping on the floor of somebody’s house. Apparently in the middle of the night, I got up, took my blanket over to the window, covered it up and yelled about blocking the aliens from coming in the window. You can imagine the ribbing I took from doing that in a room full of a dozen guys. The aliens through the window bit was a popular one for me. I did it in a hotel room with my family one time too.

I still haven’t figured out what triggers it. Being in unfamiliar locations can do it sometimes but not always. Lately it’s usually just talking in my sleep or thinking there is a spider in the bed, but the other morning I did wake up to find my pillow in the bathtub.

It’s kind of fun because I never know what I’ll find when I wake up.

benmartens April 27, 2017 Commentary

500 Unique Beers

I’m two months behind Luke, but I just had my 500th different kind of beer. Oddly enough, it was a bottled beer from Red Hook. Living just a couple miles from the brewery, I regularly have bottles of their beers and I’ve been through most of the stuff they have on tap too. But I was at Tim’s house and had their American Pale Ale for the first time. It was launched last summer.

I still enjoy trying new beers, but I think the next 500 will take longer, not because of a shortage of new beers, but because I want to enjoy some of the best ones that I’ve found along the way to 500.

And if you like trying new beers too, feel free to send me a friend request on untappd.

benmartens April 26, 2017 Food