Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Best of YouTube

Did you know that you can hop on YouTube and get a live stream from the International Space Station? The future is NOW!

Matthias Wandel is an engineering wizard and he recently posted a video showing how to make an air engine out of wood. This one got added to my (very long) project list. I’d love to attempt it some day.

And this last one isn’t a specific video but rather a whole series. For the past few months, Matt Cremona has been building his own enormous bandsaw mill in his back yard. He readily admits that he had very little prior experience and just learned it all from the web as he went. I love that all this information is available! I’ll embed a video showing him operating the finished product, but you can checkout this playlist to see the whole process.

Picking Up The Table Saw

I wrote last week about why I decided to buy a Grizzly 1023 table saw. The next trick was getting it to my house. Having Grizzly ship it would cost about $240 by the time I was all done. They have two showrooms and one of them happens to be 1.5 hours away in Bellingham. (The other one is in Missouri.) I wanted to check out their building anyway, so I made a plan to go get it.

Unfortunately they are only open on weekdays during normal business hours, but I was able to drive up there on Friday afternoon. I went back and forth on whether I should load it right into the truck and rent some ramps and a dolly to move it down or if I should rent a trailer with a ramp on the back. Both rentals were in the same price range so I went with the trailer because it would be lower to the ground and hopefully easier to unload.

I made good time on the drive up there but as I approached Bellingham, the temperature dropped and the rain started to have some snow in it. I was NOT eager to drag a trailer home in the snow so I hustled through the showroom and filled out the paperwork to pick up the saw. I want to go back some time and take it all in!

After getting loaded up, I wrapped it with some stretch wrap and strapped it down tightly. Thankfully the snow held off and I was able to make it home safely.

Tim and Logan stopped by to help me unload and it turned out that I really only needed one of them. It was relatively easy to just push it off the back and down the ramp. Oh well. The main box ended up being 450 pounds and then there was a second ~100 pound box containing the fence and rails.

In the next post, I’ll cover unboxing and setting it up.

Washington Bottle Cap Map

For about the last ten years, I’ve saved bottle caps from most of the beers that I’ve opened. I have… a lot of them. I always knew there would be a project with them at some point, but what? I like the idea of covering a coffee table, but I don’t really want a coffee table in the man cave. And I like the idea of doing a big mosaic but I don’t think I have enough of each color to do anything very impressive. Then I got the idea to do a map. There are lots of cool bottle cap maps around, so this isn’t anything original, but I made the state of Washington with bottle caps. The wood is just simple 1×4 pine and I covered it with some stain that I then sanded down to look a little distressed. This was a very Pinterest-y project.

Along the way, I thought about doing the United States and having bottle caps on the map from where the brewery was located, and I thought about doing something similar for Washington, but in the end, the placement was mostly random. There are a couple bottle caps specifically placed where the brewery is located but I’ll let you find those Easter Eggs on your own if you want to.

Seahawks As High School Prospects

Professional sports teams are looking at younger and younger kids to start recruiting. So how did the current Seahawk players look when they were coming out of high school? The Seahawks released a story showing that info (which comes from a Yahoo site).

After reading through that, it makes me wonder if these things are even worth the effort. There’s only one five star player and that’s Devin Hester. Russell Wilson, Bobby Wagner and Doug Baldwin all only managed two stars. So either these ratings are not done very well or people can improve a lot after high school. I’d imagine that both are true.

It would be interesting to look at things the other way around: how are the 5 star high school prospects fairing now? Thankfully BleacherReport.com has already gone very deep on this and has a ton of great statistics. The short answer is that if you are rated 5 stars in high school, you have a better than 50% chance of making it to the NFL and if you go early in the draft, you will probably stick around the NFL for a while.

This stuff is big business, but it must be really frustrating to deal with something so imprecise.

New Table Saw

I got my first table saw about 3 years ago. I liked it because it was a good price and it was fun to use one of Tim’s dad’s tools. Over the years I got it dialed in and built a nicer stand for it, but at it’s core, it was still a contractor saw. You can read about the differences between contractor, hybrid and cabinet saws but the main points are accuracy and power. If you’re out on a job site ripping down plywood, it’s fine if all your cuts are within 1/8″ and you’re just cutting thin boards. And I made a LOT of projects that I’m very proud of using this simple saw. But now I’m itching for something safer and more accurate.

As part of our finances, Tyla and I give ourselves an allowance every month. I saved my pennies for a long time and my original plan was to buy a CNC machine. But around that time, I got cold feet on the CNC purchase and was really feeling like I wanted a better table saw. So I started researching table saws and landed on a Grizzly G1023RLW. Here are the things I like about the saw:

  1. It’s a 3hp 240v motor. I can’t find reliable numbers for my old saw but I think it’s either 0.75hp or 1hp. I can’t count the times when I’ve been making a cut and the motor has either bogged down or the blade has stopped. That’s horribly unsafe and made me pee my pants every time. It happens more often now that I’ve started working with thicker hardwoods.
  2. It has a riving knife and a blade guard. These features in addition to the increased power should make the new saw immensely safer. Have you ever seen kickback happen? Scary.
  3. It’s a full-blown cabinet saw which means I can perfectly align the table top, the blade and the fence to all be exactly square with each other. This not only increases accuracy but it can improve safety too.
  4. Theoretically it will offer me better dust collection but I don’t have a system powerful enough to move that much air yet.
  5. It has a built-in router table. I love the space-saving aspects of it but I’m not sure how it will compare to my dedicated bench-top router table now. I expect actual aligning and cutting aspects to be similar to what I used before but the dust collection will be worse. I’m willing to make that tradeoff to save some space and if I decide not to use it in the future, there’s no big loss other than the small additional cost.

Because this sucker weighs in at 550 pounds, it’s expensive to ship. By the time I pay a freight company with liftgate service (to get it from the truck bed down to street level), it was going to be about $240. Thankfully one of Grizzly’s two showrooms is only 1.5 hours from here. So I’ll be driving up to Bellingham to get it and then I’ll be suckering a couple friends into helping me get it out of my truck and into the garage.

You may have heard about a company called SawStop. They have a patent on technology that instantly stops the blade if it contacts your skin. The demo videos are incredible, and given that table saws are the most common source of shop injuries, it’s a good place to make an investment. I strongly considered buying one, but in the end, I couldn’t justify more than double the price of the Grizzly for a tool that I only use lightly as a hobby. It’s a beautiful saw and if I cut my fingers off I’ll regret this choice, but I’m willing to accept the risk.

In the end, I’m buying an expensive tool that is way more than I need and it’s just for a hobby. This is clearly a luxury purchase. I’m thankful that I can have it and I’m excited to start shortening some boards with it! This could be the last table saw that I ever buy it might also be the most expensive tool that I ever buy.

(And by the way, I’ll be selling my old saw and router table if you’re interested…)

Plant Bench

Elijah is getting interested in how things grow and we’ve talked about having a garden, so this year we decided to go for it. I thought it would be fun to start plants from seeds inside. We have a great bay window in the front room which would be a perfect spot, but we just had a cardboard box sitting there with one plant on it. It was time for an upgrade.

I bought some mahogany mostly because I had never worked with it before (aside from a cutting board project) and it seemed like a good excuse to try it out. I learned that mahogany creates incredibly fine dust! EVERYWHERE. But overall it wasn’t nice to work with.

My original plan involved using floating tenons for the first time. You cut a mortise into each board and then make a tenon by itself and glue it into each side. It’s kind of like an elongated dowel. But alas, I could never get my test pieces to go very well and I eventually tabled the idea for later use. Since I had already cut the pieces to length for that joinery method, the only real solution was pocket holes. I felt totally ridiculous using pocket holes on a nice hardwood, but oh well, it worked and it was easy.

Once I made that change, everything went together quickly. I used a teak oil finish which was new for me. It wiped on easily and I put a few coats on in hopes of protecting it just a little from spilled water and the sun. I still think that in a few years we’re going have obvious fade marks where the plants sit.

The end result looks nice and aside from my joinery skills fail, I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s plenty big enough to hold lots of plants and it’s short enough that ELijah can easily see it and help out with the watering.

McDonald’s

The other weekend I had to spend a couple hours at church putting up some new light fixtures. I took Elijah along with me and he quietly played with the school toys and helped me out for the whole time. He was so good that I decided to reward him with his very first trip to a McDonald’s. I don’t have anything against that place and we aren’t avoiding it intentionally, but it’s not on our regular rotation unless we’re running through an airport or something like that.

I picked out one that had an indoor play place so he got to start with his own Happy Meal and then play on the equipment for as long as he wanted. That turned out to be about 45 minutes and then we finished it off with an ice cream cone. He was a little excited about the whole thing as you can see in the pictures. He said he really liked going to “Donalds”.

Railroad Show

Elijah loves trains so we decided to take him down to a big model train show at the Pacific Science Center. It was a good excuse to check out that place too.

The show felt a bit odd. There were a bunch of displays set up all over the museum, and the museum itself is made up of an oddly shaped (modern architecture or something goofy) buildings so it was tricky to know if you’d seen everything or not. He was interested in the trains but he was even more interested in the kid science displays.

We got there right when it opened and then left a little after lunch time when it started to get busy. I don’t know that we’ll be going back there because it’s a pretty expensive day, but Elijah had a lot of fun so I’d say it was worth the trip.

Chromecast

We got a Chromecast back in 2014 and while I thought it was a neat device, it ended up in my old gadget box in the closet.

Now that we have Android phones, I pulled it out again. Our new phones combined with all the improvements they’ve made to the software in the last 3 years has really made a difference. This thing is awesome!

The basic idea is that when you’re watching a video or listening to audio on your phone, you press a button and it is “cast” to the Chromecast device that is hooked to your TV. The Chromecast then takes over and plays the video. You can use your phone to browse around and it won’t interrupt the video (though you can also use your phone as a remote control to pause, fast forward, etc.)

I’m amazed at how many apps support this! The obvious ones like YouTube work great, but so does Spotify, my favorite podcast app, and even our security camera app. Duplication of a computer screen to the Chromecast also works infinitely better than it used to. Chromecast doesn’t support Amazon Video (or vice versa… whatever… Google and Amazon are fighting), but I can play a video on my desktop and cast it to the TV. It works great. Granted that’s a limited use scenario since we have other devices hooked up to the TV that play Amazon Video, but it’s cool that it works.

If you have Android or iOS and you have need for an easy way to show pictures, video and audio from your phone onto your TV, Chromecast should be on your shopping list. It’s so cheap it’s almost a no-brainer.

Favorite Things of 2016

I looked back through my Amazon purchases in 2016 and thought I’d share a few of my favorites:

  • iVac Switch – I don’t know why I waited so long to buy this. If you use a dust collector in your shop, this is an awesome upgrade. It automatically turns your dust collector on when you turn a tool on. When the tool is shut off, the vacuum runs for a few more seconds and then turns off.
  • Truck cover – My truck should probably be on this list but that seemed a little silly. This truck bed cover, however, is a perfect fit for the list (and the truck!) I can unroll it or roll it up in less than a minute. It creates an almost waterproof seal over the bed. If you’ve fought with a tarp even one time, you’ll appreciate this purchase.
  • Amcrest 1080p cameras – We continue to build out our home surveillance system with bargain hardware and it continues to work out very well. These new 1080p cameras are incredible! The only problem is that it makes me want to replace all of my old ones.
  • Kingdom Builder – This board game is a gift we got for Logan, but it’s also available on your phone. The rules are fairly simple but the strategy is complex. I’m a wee bit addicted to this one right now.