Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Shop Vac Cart

I’ve really enjoyed having dust collection in my workshop, even if it’s just a simple shop vac with a cyclone. I kept it under my workbench, but the mess of wires and hoses basically meant that it stayed there. It was a pain to dig it out to vacuum out the car or anything like that.

I finally made a version of Jay Bates’s shop vac cart. The cyclone hangs above the shop vac so it uses less floor space and gives me a space to collect all the various attachments. It’s also very easy to move around.

The project was pretty simple but I’m always amazed at my ability to mess up the easiest things. The end result is good enough though and I think it will be helpful. One negative that I didn’t forsee is that the hose connection is now ~5 feet off the ground and most of my dust collection parts are near the ground. That just means I need a little bit longer hose but maybe that will be offset by being able to move the cart closer to the machine I’m using.

benmartens March 15, 2017 Woodworking

Kingdom Builder Strategy Guide

Logan got Kingdom Builder for Christmas and a few days later I discovered it was available on my phone. I’ve been playing it since then. A lot.

Whenever we head to Wil Wheaton’s Table Top Games videos on YouTube to see a video of them playing it. They have an episode for Kingdom Builder and it’s a good way to understand what the game is about. It’s a deep strategy game with very simple rules. There’s some luck based on what type of resource you draw each turn, but the game is mostly skill.

I couldn’t find a nice strategy guide for the game so I thought I’d make an attempt. I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve played through a few hundred matches so I figure I can at least get one started.

  1. Before you put down any pieces, come up with a strategy for your game.
    1. What kinds of scoring cards are out? Which ones will give you the most points? Some cards like Knights are worth a lot of points and others like Citizens are worth less. If, for example, there aren’t any high scoring cards out, then you might want to focus more on building next to castles. If the game involves Farmers, you need to figure out how to get your pieces into all four quadrants.
    2. What special tiles are in play? If there is a Hermit card turned up and you don’t play on the Horse tile, you’re probably not going to win. There are other good matches too. If Merchants are in play, try to grab the Boat tile if it is available. The Watchtower tile is a great one if you’re using either Discoverer or Knight cards.
    3. Usually it’s hard to focus on all three scoring cards at once, so pick the two highest value ones and focus on those first. Get points with the third card when you’re stuck with the first two toward the end of the game.
  2. Be careful where you place your tile. That sounds obvious, but those first two or three turns can make or break your game. For example, let’s say that you have a Farmers card and you need to get a piece in all four quadrants. If your first place touches all of the different land types, then it’s going to be very hard to get to all four quadrants. But if you can play those first pieces, get a tile, and only touch one resource type, you have a good chance of being able to play somewhere else on your next turn. On the flip side, if you’re trying to get points with Lords or Citizens, then you might want to spread out and touch lots of different resources so that you can keep growing those settlements.
  3. The special location tiles come in two main categories. A winning game will probably make use of some from each category.
    1. Relocation: These let you move pieces to other locations after they have been played. This is useful for breaking up settlements in a Hermits game but has other value too.
    2. Additional pieces: These let you play more than 3 pieces in a game. It’s really hard to win a game if you still have 10 pieces left when someone else goes out.
  4. The value of the Horse tile cannot be understated. You can make up for a lot of mistakes with this tile and also grab a lot of extra points. If you have both tiles it’s pretty easy to travel around the board and get most/all of the castle points. The horse tile is a great first play too because if you happen to be touching the next resource card, you could play your horse tile first and hop away leaving you free to play elsewhere on the board.
  5. With every play, think about how many points you’re getting. Sometimes you can get 4 or 5 points with a single piece (play next to a castle next to water and/or mountains with Fisherman and/or MIners in play.) The total points in a game will vary widely by the type of cards in play (I’ve seen winning scores below 40 and above 115), but in general, you need to get at least one point for every piece. If you have to put down a piece with 0 points (or even 0.5 points), think about how you can move it somewhere else on the board with one of your relocation tiles.
  6. Get your own house in order first, but as you’re playing out your strategy, consider opportunities to block your opponents. For example, if they don’t have a Horse and they’re building a long row for Knights, a single piece in their way might keep them away from a lot of points. Also, in a game of Hermits, don’t leave an isolated single resource open. That’s a surefire point for someone else who draws that resource card.
  7. The randomness in the game stems from having to draw a terrain card at the start of every turn. You can decrease the risk by know what you’ll do with every different terrain card. They might not all be equally awesome, but hopefully you can do something with every card to get you some points.

This is one of my favorite board games. You can explain the rules to a new player in a couple minutes but it will take a lifetime to master it.

benmartens March 14, 2017 Gaming

Survival Rations

We recently had another bi-annual Survival Sunday. I feel compelled to do less checking for the spring one than the fall one since we generally lose power in the fall, but we did do a few key things like changing out our stored gas and removing food items that were near expiration.

We’re slowly refining the types of foods that we keep in the survival rations box. Here are a few of the considerations:

  1. Canned items generally last longer. I don’t like to buy things unless they’re good for another 1-1.5 years. Otherwise we just keep replacing them over and over again.
  2. Don’t go overboard. In all but the most extreme cases, you’ll still be able to access the normal food that’s in your house and I bet you can coast a long time just on that even if the power is out.
  3. Stock up on water. A family of three will use ~1.5 gallons a day just for drinking. Our goal is to have enough on hand for 3-5 days. Our emergency rations are largely made up of water jugs!
  4. Buy food that you’re willing to eat in a normal situation. We don’t like to toss the food so if it’s not going to last until the next Survival Sunday, we put it in the pantry and eat it.

Everybody has their own comfort level with this stuff so find your own and plan accordingly. I feel good about the extra level of backup we get from a few hours of work per year, but I also know that we are almost certainly never going to dig into these supplies for a real emergency.

benmartens March 13, 2017 Commentary

Best of YouTube

Colin Furze is blowing up YouTube. Almost literally. I recommend that you watch almost all of his videos, but here’s his most recent one. He made a giant fire tornado with fireworks on top to celebrate hitting 4 million subscribers to his channel. Tim, I expect something like this at your next Fourth of July party.

Matt Cremona is an accomplished woodworker, but he’s been spend the past months building a giant bandsaw mill in his back yard. This is a big step up from the chainsaw mill he used before. After cutting some “smaller” logs, he was finally able to load test it with a 53″ cut. The saw didn’t even bog down. If I still lived in Minneapolis I’d be excited to visit Matt and buy some wood from him. It’s probably not economical to drive from Seattle though.

As part of Elijah’s bedtime routine, he gets to watch a few minutes of YouTube. Originally it was usually something like a music video from Caspar Babypants but now he just asks for something and we pull it up. For the past few weeks he has been asking exclusively for Lego videos. That’s how we stumbled across a YouTube user called JANGBRiCKS. He’s a full time YouTuber and he spends his time working on his enormous Lego layout and reviewing new sets that come out. Most of the videos are too long for Elijah’s bedtime, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t continued watching them after finishing putting Elijah to sleep.

benmartens March 10, 2017 Links

Find My Phone

“Where’s my phone?” is a common question in our house, and I’m guessing we’re not alone. Assuming you aren’t able to have someone call your phone for whatever reason, here are two alternatives we use.

  1. We have some WeMo light switches in the house. I hooked them up to IFTTT. If we hold down the light switch button for more than 2-3 seconds, it will call our phones. If the ringer is off, that might not help a lot.
  2. Type “Find my phone” into Google (or visit the Android Device Manager page). This is where you’d go if you lost your phone and want to wipe it remotely, but it also has a “Ring” feature that will ringer your phone even if the volume is turned off. I’m guessing there is something similar for iPhones too.

Calling our cell phones is one of the main reasons we still have a landline, but we’re looking to drop that (and switch our alarm monitoring solution) so we’ll switch over to these alternatives.

benmartens March 9, 2017 Gadgets

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