Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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

Best Of YouTube

Bad Lip Reading makes it into the list again with a recap of the NFL for 2017. “My brain is so loud.”

Adam Ruins Everything is apparently a show on TruTV, but there are a bunch of clips on YouTube and that’s how I’ve been watching it. Learn why that electric car might actually be worse for the environment than a regular car and why that lady who sued for hot coffee from McDonald’s isn’t as crazy as you probably think she is.

The White Rabbit Project is on Netflix, not YouTube, but it might tickle your fancy if you liked Mythbusters. Tory, Kari and Grant are back together again and they are sort of testing myths but it’s a little different format. It’s not as good as Mythbusters, but if you liked those three, this is at least a good one to have on in the background while you do other things.

benmartens February 22, 2017 Links

500 Unique Beers

Congrats to Luke who has won the race to be the first one in our group with 500 unique beers logged in the Untappd app! His 500th beer was a Castor from 3rd Sign Brewery and he only a 3 out of 5 stars.

I’ve already done a post with some stats about our beer drinking, but here’s another one. It’s the average score that we give to beers. You can see that I’m a little more stodgy than the others, or maybe I’m just more willing to try beers I know I won’t like just so I can log them in the app. (I’ve included Logan this time since he has started using the app too.)

User Average Rating
Ben 2.87
Dad 3.53
Logan 3.15
Luke 3.16
Total 3.22

How about which breweries we like the most? For this I only considered breweries that 2 out of the 4 of us have tried. Here the top 10:

Knee Deep Brewing Company
Laughing Dog Brewing
The Alchemist
7 Seas Brewing
Epic Brewing Co. (Utah, Colorado)
21st Amendment Brewery
Arrogant Bastard Brewing
Founders Brewing Co.
ABC Brewpub
Everybody’s Brewing
Bell’s Brewery, Inc.

I was going to have a chart showing the type of beers we drink the most, but we all had pale ales at the top of our lists.

Ok, I need to go find a beer. I’m thirsty. Slainte!

benmartens February 21, 2017 Food

Neighborhood Brewing

When I’m out walking with Elijah, we regularly go past a neighbors house down the street and around the corner. He has his garage door open a lot and it’s obvious that he has some fancy brewing equipment in there. One day I finally stopped in with Elijah and just said, “You’ve got quite a setup here. Do you mind visitors?”

The guy’s name is Kevin and he is indeed very excited to have visitors. He’s in the process of launching his own brewery and has amassed some very nice equipment. His garage has about 10 taps, a small bar, some TVs and his brewing equipment. I’ve sampled some of his beer and it’s delicious! This is not your typical home brew setup.

He said he hasn’t really started marketing anything yet, but you can follow him on Facebook at Global Beer Company.

benmartens February 20, 2017 Commentary

Weber Warranty

Almost five years ago, I purchased a Weber Genesis E330. It’s an expensive grill and it was one of the best purchases I’ve made. Cheap grills work fine and I’m thankful for the ones I had before this Genesis, but their optimum lifetime is only a year or two and then it’s just frustrating. I’ve used this Genesis heavily for 5 straight years and it works almost as well as the day I put it together in any weather conditions.

This year I decided it was time to replace a couple parts so I called Weber to order some new burners. In less then 2.5 minutes, the representative was sending me 4 new burners for free because I had just squeaked in under the 5 year warranty for those parts. She even through in a new locking wheel for free.

I love this company! This grill is going to easily last me another decade or two. If you’re in the market for a grill, consider a Genesis. Yes, it’s a big initial investment, but over it’s lifetime, you’ll save money and you will enjoy grilling every time you fire it up.

benmartens February 17, 2017 Commentary