With our new house having a big walk-in closet we won’t need dressers, so we’ll be selling our bedroom set, which meant it was a good time for new nightstands. Here’s a photo dump of the build.
These will be floating on the wall in the new house, with about five inches of space under them. I did a lot of things in this build I’ve never tried before, so I learned a lot. I love how the decorative grooves turned out on the drawer fronts, which was inspired by something Michael Alm did on his kitchen cupboards. The oak handles were made with inspiration from a couple we liked on Etsy (1 & 2).
I can’t wait to get moved in this summer and mount these on the wall!
I’m loving my new desk. There are a couple of needed improvements though. First, I always have a water bottle, coffee, pop, or several on my desk when working, so I had grabbed this coaster from the living room. It bugged me all week.
Can you believe I’d never made a set of coasters? Time to fix that.
This was a simple project and a lot of fun to knock out something small. I’ll keep two of the coasters in the office and put the other two in the living room.
Over the years, without success, I’ve tried to stand some while working. Hopefully a motorized adjustable base will encourage me to stand for certain tasks and even if I can do a couple of 20-30 minute sessions each day it’ll be a big help.
I got to work processing walnut boards and white oak flooring.
There was a lot of jointing, cross-cutting, ripping, planing, more ripping, and trimming. I’m excited to use that box of off-cuts to make an end grain cutting board or two! I felt like the key to this build was going to be the glue-ups. I started with sections of 9-10 pieces and ended up with eight of those.
I ran each section through the planer, with the help of some shimming for a couple, to flatten them. I made a temporary sled to square up the sides to the faces.
To help assemble the sections, I used a couple of biscuits on each glue joint.
I glued up two sections at a time, which gave me four bigger sections. Then I glued up two of those at a time and one final glue up.
I drilled and put in all of the bolt inserts, which will attach the top to the desk base.
I took three passes with the router to put a big chamfer along the bottom edge.
With a jigsaw, I rough cut out a spot in the back to pass cables through. Then I did some sanding to smooth it out and added a chamfer with the router. Here is it, viewed with the desk bottom facing up.
Due to the base’s cross support, there’s was limited depth for drawers, but there was width for them. I took some old kitchen cabinet drawers, chopped them in half, and closed them up with scrap plywood.
Then I worked on what I’m calling the drawer box even though it’s not a box. I also cut top rails from hardboard and oversized drawer faces from walnut. Grabbed strips of walnut for face-framing and glued together pieces of oak to make drawer pulls.
All the sanding! I went through 80, 120, 180, and 220 grits on the top and sides of the desk.
Time to put some finish on, which is always a favorite step to see how it’s really going to look. It was my first time trying out a hard wax oil and I used Bee Nooba Wax from Bumblechutes. It was very easy to apply and I’ll definitely be using it on future projects. I applied one coat to the bottom and three coats to the sides and top.
Then it was back to the drawers. I stained the “box” black and ended up having to trim some things to fit better around the rail of the desk base. I sized the drawer faces, made oak handles with 10° angles, assembled everything, and applied finish.
It turned out great! I can’t wait to see it in our new house later this year!
It was a good December for making when I was able to catch up on a lot of electronics kits. I’ve been working on a new desk for my office since November, which I hope to finish soon. Then I’ll be starting to build other things for the new house.
I was given a replacement AC adapter for an Acer laptop, which isn’t compatible with the Dell Optiplex micro PC I wanted to use it with. The output is close enough to work, so I looked for an adapter to convert from the 5.5×1.7mm connector used by the Acer to 4.5x3mm used by the Dell. I couldn’t find an adapter anywhere! I did however find a pigtail adapter on Amazon for about $8 I could wire in. Here’s the original connector and the new cable.
I opened up the power brick.
Then I made sure to test the output voltage and the polarity of the wires and connector with a multimeter. I noticed an unused spot for LED1 on the circuit board, so I figured I’d see if connecting a second LED would provide some other status indicator.
All it seemed to do was take over and disable LED2. So I removed it and left the original green LED. I desoldered the original cable, which only had positive and ground wires. The board had a spot with an S, which I assume means “signal,” so when connecting the pigtail, I soldered the blue wire there.
I checked the voltage on the new connector and it was as expected.
I plugged in the Dell and everything seemed to work. I cleaned the old thermal paste off the 3 components that screwed to a big metal heat sink and put on new paste. When I went to close everything I realized the black wire was too short, preventing the cable from reaching the hole in the power brick. I had to solder on a short extension and cover it with shrink tube.
Tucked everything back in the power brick, snapped it together, and it’s good to go.
PissOff was project #9 of the Boldport Club, which was before my membership, but I bought it in December of 2018 with my credits when the club closed. I recorded an unboxing video on February 21, 2021 and I guess I ran out of time for the build. The project sat on my shelf for almost three more years before I finally assembled the circuit, which ended up being five years after ordering it!
The kit created a proximity sensor via IR and combined it with annoying noises. With so many surface mount components, this was one of my most challenging electronic soldering builds. I really struggle when an IC has a lot of pins. At one point I tried some other solder and realized what I’d been using was junk, so it went right in the trash.
I screwed up the placement of a couple of SMD capacitors, but caught myself soon enough to remember which ones needed to be exchanged. The other mistake I made was swapping locations between the IR phototransistor and diode, which I didn’t catch until testing. After putting them in the correct locations, everything worked!
Here’s a 8x speed run of the unboxing and some footage of Ninja’s testing.
Nearly five years after completing the first model with my niece, this morning I cruised through the other models. It’s really more of a project for kids to learn about electronics, so it didn’t do much for me.
I bought this R2-D2 model kit from a toy store in Gatlinburg, Tennessee this summer.
There wasn’t any obvious way to open the package, so I tore off the top and then realized it ripped the instructions. The instructions are terrible, which led to making a lot of build mistakes. It was a very difficult build, which took me several hours. I even had to pull out super glue because the folded metal breaks if you have to fold it in the opposite direction to fix a mistake.
It turned out pretty good. I wouldn’t buy another one of these kits though.
The planning phase has a been a lot of work, but we made it to the end. The plans are finalized and the construction agreement has been signed. This photo is only a portion of the revisions.
Our first meeting with the builder, Cobblestone Homes, was on August 21st and we signed on December 11th, which was our 13th meeting. In the end, we went with a custom build, heavily inspired by their popular split ranch floor plan. Their plan was too big for us, so we moved in some walls, changed the location of the basement stairs, and made a larger walk-in closet and pantry. We saved about 200 square feet and will get exactly what we want.
I did some early drawings before passing off to the architect. Since this is based off a Cobblestone plan, I believe they hold the copyright. This was my first attempt and we ended up flipping the entire house.
This next drawing I did is very close to what we ended up with. The final plan is 1,947 square feet.
Hopefully we close on the loan in a few weeks and then the lot becomes ours. If the weather cooperates, they should be able to break ground in February. We can’t wait!
Nick Momrik 