Meat Grinder Base

We picked up a decent sized grinder recently and wanted to mount it really solidly on the bench without having to bolt it to a huge piece of wood so it would still fit in the sink for cleaning.  The grinder was also sitting too low to put a bowl under it so it needed a little height to make it more useful, I have some spare steel in the garage and I figured that it would last better than wood if it was going to get wet.  Before we go any further, let me state that this design is overkill by a huge degree but I am working with the steel I have on hand and I doubt it will need replacing.

I started off with a piece of box steel, cut and bent it to fit the base solidly then clamped and welded it.  

the end of the steel had one square of steel on one end from some other project i hadn't used it for yet and I just cut another and welded it on the other side so that it would be easy to clean.

I went digging in my scrap steel bin and came out with some pieces that I could cut and weld into what was in my head for mounting easily.  The bench this is being mounted on currently was banged together in an afternoon from wood from the dump, we just needed some extra shelf and bench space in what we call the cats room because his food bowl is there but it has the deep freezer and the server lives there too.  The bench there is mostly used for dehydrating so that Shay has somewhere to lay out the fruits and things and put them in the dehydrator.  As a result of that I can bolt whatever I like to it to test ideas, I think it came up nice enough for now, but in our house I am planning to build the bench will have a spot for this.

I think you can see in the above and below pictures how I cut the steel and welded it together, its a bit frankenstein but its solid. I give it a lifetime warranty.

I ground, filed and sanded the new steel then gave it a coat of primer, it looked good enough but I wanted it to be really easy to clean so I decided to get some fibreglass to fill in the holes, I figured that with some bog, spray putty and a few coats of metallic silver it would look good as well as clean nicely.

At this point we tried it out and the design is solid and it works incredibly well, no movement whatsoever.  We did discover that its a bit too cumbersome for cleaning, I knew it was going to be heavy but it isn't the weight so much as the size that makes the problem.

I welded the bolts to the base so they were sticking up and easy to slide the grinder onto, I did this for ease if use, I could have done it the other way around, but it would have meant threading bolts through multiple holes with 2 heavy objects, this way is easier to use.  I knew that having it this way up I would either have to grind part of the leg away so that I could either use a normal wingnut or come up with an original solution, If I shortened the bolts it would be hard to do up the nuts without including a spanner in the deal and I didn't want to do that.  My solution was to make a custom wingnut for the job, with a spacer washer built in to it.   There's probably a name for one of these things but I have no idea what it is.

I started with some flat steel bar and cut off a couple of squares, then ground out the middle of one side so that a nut would fit in the gap.  I welded the nut to the bar and found a couple of things that came with some bolts I used in the bedhead I made (more on that another time) they were threaded on the inside but too big for the threads I was using, this made them good washers, I didn't even have to drill them out. I welded everything together and tested it out, it worked perfectly.

I  fibreglassed, primed and painted everything.

It seems OK, it wont win any fashion awards but I don't think I will need to replace it any time soon.  I think I rushed it a bit towards the end trying to get it finished before work tomorrow, I could have done with spending another day or so going over it again but for the amount of use it will get I really think this is fine.

A Part of the Plan: Tracked Excavator

I have a fairly well fleshed out plan and I am going to write some of my ideas for the future down on this blog so you can see where my head is at when it comes to what is ahead.  I am going to start with the excavator as it will be one of the first things we get after we sort out some land, we want a minimum of about 5 acres to accomplish everything I have envisioned.

When we get land I have budgeted to spend up to $15k buying a tracked excavator, I have seen them on TradeMe for that price between 1.25 and 2.5 ton, anywhere in that range should do what we will need it for.

I have decided to buy this because it will be the most versatile vehicle for what I want to use it for and I have experience on a tracked vehicle.
I am planning to use the Excavator for the following nefarious purposes:

• Shaping the land for the structures to sit on (House, Garage, Solar Wood Kiln, Chicken Coop, Pig Sty, Somewhere for the cow and a couple of sheep to sleep).
• Digging the septic system/composting toilet.
• Digging trenches for pipes on the water collection system and drainage from the grey water system.
• Digging any dams or swales to suit the permaculture plan that we will devise when we find some land.
• I will be milling my own lumber eventually so I will use it to move logs to the mill and pull any stumps.
• Digging a cellar on the house for storage of foods.
• Digging raised bed gardens.
• I want to make as many of my own bricks as possible beginning with the Compressed Earth Bricks I plan to make all the structures out of and then if I can make fire bricks I will need it to collect the right clay for that so I can make: rocket mass heater, forge, foundry, kiln and Oven.
• Hydraulics can be used for other purposes like powering the CEB press.

Once the main structures are made we will not be using the excavator for very much other than the logging side of things so I might be able to sell it off and buy an electric golf cart that I can charge with the solar panels.  If I made a log trailer for it I should be able to move stuff around manually using a winch as long as the logs are not too big.  I am planning to build my own chainsaw mill so I will not be able to mill huge logs anyway, viability will depend on the land we end up getting and whether it is flat or hilly.  There is an excellent video on Youtube that explains exactly what I mean.  My chainsaw is electric with the mill and having some portable solar panels in mind.

I could also just convert it to biodiesel and make my own fuel.  I have built a few engines in my youth and I don't think this will be much harder from the literature I have read.

Wood box

The wood box was made to stop the accumulation of cardboard boxes with wood in them that we had previously.  We are still getting our wood from the dump as it is free and we are saving every cent towards owning land somewhere.  As a result of the dump wood, we had to keep it somewhere and cardboard boxes don't last long when holding heavy wet wood, especially when left outside.

So then came the wood box idea, we planned to keep all the wood in the garage or under the house and use a fisheries crate to transport it to the box so the box had to be big enough to hold at least a fisheries container stacked up high and probably more.

We ended up finding all the wood in one trip to the dump, someone had replaced all their decking or perhaps siding off something, it was pretty rough looking but we only needed a box that would keep the wood off the floor and look better than a cardboard box.  After getting the wood home and de-nailing it I discovered some of it was unusable but there seemed to be enough to do the job.

I only have a video of the box prior to varnishing, I didn't take pictures during the build unfortunately.

This was the first wood I had tried using mitred corners and it looks good enough for my first try.  I think next time I would check my angle more often as it drifted off slightly over the course of cutting everything.

After I had everything cut I went over it with a power plane and it immediately looked fantastic, then after a little assembly and varnish I made the lid so that we could cover it up during summer.  I had run out of the original wood for the lid so it doesn't match at all, I am still keeping an eye out for something that I might be able to use to replace it that would look better with the box.

Remember that time when ... I made a coffee table

This is more of the geek than the green but I used this project to learn skills.

The coffee table started out as a replacement for a cheap table I got from The Warehouse for $20 new, you can imagine what kind of high quality that bought for me.  I had just started working with wood and thought this might be a good learning project for me to pick up some skills and solve the problem we had with the coffee table falling apart.   At about the same time Shay and I were both playing World of Warcraft in the evenings, she was using a laptop and I was using a PC.  Shay was having massive issues with the laptop/vista combination, it was crashing and overheating so I decided to make a coffee table with a desktop PC built into it.  There were several reasons for using a desktop rather than upgrading the laptop:

• Cheaper initial cost
• Cheaper upgrades
• More power
• Bigger screen
• Nicer controls

I started out with a bed base that we tried to sell and then tried to give away but nobody wanted it so I re purposed it.  I stripped the coverings off and pulled all the wood apart which was quite a pain as it was all glued and stapled with 40mm long staples.  Once I had all the wood for the base I started out by making it as wide as the monitor that would have to hide inside it and just a bit longer than our old table.  I needed to have room on one side for the monitor/keyboard/mouse/usb devices to hide in and the other side held the PC/Power brick/fans.

Once I had finished a base and checked it was square with the legs attached I moved to making it the right height, just slightly taller than the broken one, I left about 25mm for the table top height to go on top.

Once I had the framework done I welded up some steel for mounting the monitor on and ordered a swivel off trademe so that it could be tilted up/down/left/right.  I bolted the bracket on and trimmed the edges then painted everything.

I ordered the wood and it was far more expensive that I thought it would be, and I would have gone a different way now that I know more, but at the time my skills were really crap and I wanted something that looked good enough to sit in the middle of the lounge.  I got one sheet of 5mm ply for the sides and bottom of the table and one sheet of 25mm for the top.  I gave the dimensions I wanted it cut to the people I bought it from as I did not believe I could cut the wood straight enough at the time.

The wood turned up a couple of days later and it looked pretty good, they had put it through a sander on one side which took the bulk of the crap off it but left huge big scars in the wood from their shitty sander.  Everything fit perfectly so I drilled and screwed the edges on to the table, then moved to how I would mount the top.

I decided to make some metal brackets for the top so that it could slot in to the base and then I would just have some nuts to tighten, this worked perfectly and has made the table very solid, there are 32 screws and 4 bolts holding down that one side of the table.

Next came the hinges and my first real problem, I still haven't worked this one out which is the main reason I have not taken the table back down to the shed.  I want the hinges to be invisible of possible but every solution to that problem I have seen has either been too small or it wont fit.  I have just used a couple of brass hinges for now and they work just fine, I just think they look crappy.

So the mock-up was complete and seemed to work, I pulled it all apart again and sanded for what seemed like days then put a single coat of clear varnish over top of it.  As soon as the varnish dried a whole bunch of things I hadn't seen before popped up so I decided that I would just leave it at one coat for a few months until the varnish had gone hard enough to sand back off again without using a ton of sandpaper.

I have since assembled it and had it working for 5 months or so I guess, and its worked without a hitch.  We have been using a wireless dongle to connect it to the net but I am going to change it permanently to cable shortly as its becoming intermittent for some reason.

This is just me again explaining it.  We haven't changed much since this was taken, there are a ton of things I am going to change next time its in the shed, but that's a blog for another day.

Raised Bed Garden Experiment

As we are planning to go off grid eventually, we wanted to have a go at gardening, so I made 2 raised bed gardens in our back yard so we could have a bit of experimentation with various foods.

Shay has decided to go with kale and silver beet in the first garden and it has really taken off, we have not done any companion planting here as there is not much room.  The raised beds are made to fit the chicken run squares over top of them so that we can leave chickens on there to clean it up when we decide to change crops.

I made a couple of different shaped glasshouse coverings from some trimmed wood and plastic.  I am planning to make any raised beds we make in a more permanent residence much bigger, probably the length of 5 squares, but the same width so that we can always use the chooks for cleanup and fertilisation.

we are making our own compost and using everything that is scraped out of the chicken coop each day and all our scraps that the chooks won't eat.  The compost bin needs some work, but it seems to be doing the job it was designed for just fine.  I need to make a lid for it to keep the rats out but before I do that I want to make some kind of protective skirting so they can not dig under it.  We want to keep the compost bin with an open bottom though so that worms can get in and out.

It has been about 4 months and the results are fairly encouraging.

We have been nibbling from this and some of the plants took it pretty hard when we took their glasshouse away but they are getting much stronger now.

First time working with hardwood

I made a bread box over the past few days or so and it is beginning to look usable.  I have found that working with hardwood is almost like working with mild steel, tons of work with hand tools but I have learned a lot and I think I can do better next time.  I kind of made the design as I went, I was originally going to make a square but Shay thought it might be a bit bland so we went with the new shape and it looks better than I think my original design would have looked.  The grain in the wood looks amazing, the pictures really do not do it justice at all.

The whole thing was made from reclaimed wood, it looked like an old dresser or something that had been pulled apart and sent to the dump, when I saw it I had a feeling that all it needed was a power sander and a whole lot of time to make it look good again.  It came up much better than I thought it would.

I tried 3 handles before finally settling on the fourth one, it looks much better than the others as it screws on from the inside instead of the outside like its predecessors.

I really need to get a nice straight bench too, the one I threw together when we got here is warped, mostly because I made it with warped wood but everything I make on this bench has a slight wobble and its making me crazy.

The Chicken Coop (Part Two)

The dining hall was devised to stop our increasing rat problem.  We had rats getting in the run every night and eating any left over lay pellets, they were digging under the run and we would come out each day to find little round holes in the mud.  We put bricks over the holes as they popped up, hoping that they would run out of places to dig, this turned out to be a mistake as they just dug under the bricks too.  Shay once picked up a brick to move it to another part of the run and there was a rat under it looking up at her.  Not cool.

Instead of trying to rat proof the run Shay had the idea that it would be better to make an area that both kept the food nice and dry, was totally rat proof, and also gave them somewhere warm to hang out in the morning before Shay opens the run so they can go out and have a scratch around.

I made the dining hall out of wood from the dump again, I ended up buying a bundle of 10 garden stakes to finish it off towards the end because I ran out of wood and pickings were getting slim at the dump because of winter finally arriving.  I tried to keep it as light as possible so it was easy to move but it also had to be strong enough to last a few years.  I wanted the whole front to open so that we could scrape it out easily so rather than going for a single door that opened upwards as was the original plan, we went with double doors.  Every outside surface is either covered in plastic then chicken wire, or just chicken wire.  If the rats decide they can eat through wire I might have a problem, but right until that moment, this is indestructible.

Since adding the dining hall we have not had any rats.  We have had them replaced with sparrows.

Now instead of 2 or 3 rats stealing food every night we get 10 - 20 sparrows flying in to eat the food.  I picked one off with my air rifle a couple of days ago and when it fell down into the chicken run they instantly pecked it to death, was most gruesome.

I am not sure what to do about the sparrows yet.

We have also added an outside fenced area that can be moved around.   This new garden bar has been quite handy as its easy to move and we can move it very quickly.  There are essentially 3 areas for the birds now.

• The Suite and dining hall area.
• The run
• The outside garden bar

We can close them in to any of these areas, we usually leave them in the run and close off the garden bar if we go out.

So this is where we are at now, I am sure there will be more modifications to go as when summer rolls around it will introduce a whole new set of issues.  I am hoping once we have had the chooks for a year or so I will have most of the major problems ironed out.

Here is a video of me explaining everything.

Cheers.

The Circle of Life Bucket.

The circle of life bucket was picked up from a video we saw on YouTube, the guy had a bucket with holes all over it to let flies in and maggots out.  He had put dead rats inside it that he had caught, then hung the bucket off the ground so that the maggots would drop to the ground and the chooks could eat them.  Shay named it the circle of life bucket because we were having major issues with rats once the run had been moved to the grassy paddock.  We devised several traps to try and catch the little pricks but they were smarter than us.  I believe the final count was 8 rats and 5 mice by the time we gave up and made the dining hall for the chooks.  So the circle of life is: the rats eat the chook food, the maggots eat the rats, the chooks eat the maggots, then we eat the eggs.

We have put the bucket on top of the run where the wire is so that the maggots fall down when they crawl out, this way the chooks can just nip them up off the ground.  I have added holes since the original shown above as the maggots were not dropping out very well.

Since installing the new dining hall we have not seen any rats near the chooks, they still visit the compost bin though so that is next on my list.

The Chicken Coop (Part One)

 I know she doesn't look like much, but she's got  it where it counts, kid.

I had several criteria that the chicken coop needed to meet so the design really evolved from that.

• It had to use wood that was mostly under 1200mm long.  We were getting all our timber from the firewood pile at the dump so the pickings were OK but only under a certain length as it was mostly offcuts and demolished buildings there.  
• It had to be portable.  We needed to be able to fit all the bits on our trailer to move it when we eventually have to leave here, it also needed to be movable around the yard outside so that we could give the hens fresh grass to nibble and keep them a bit cleaner.
• It had to be easy to maintain.  The whole thing was designed around ease of cleaning as nobody wants to spend longer than they have to scooping up chicken poo.
• It had to be modular and configurable.  We are not sure where we will go next and what we might have to do there so the coop might need to be smaller or go around a corner, I wanted to be ready for that contingency. 

The end result is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion, I have a few more ideas that I am going to be adding to it soon that will help though.  I have some pictures and a video of me walking you through the whole idea.

All the wood we got from the dump had to be checked for nails and have them removed, I would guess half the usable wood had nails in it and I am very careful not to get nails near my woodworking power tools.  This is just a sample of some of the wood we had to work with.

I started out by making a framework, I wanted it to be wide enough to hold 6 birds on the roost,   I made 3 nesting boxes as I had no idea how many I would need for 6 birds, turned out that just one would have been fine but this is how it started.

The piece of plywood in the front there was cut in half, the other half went on this side of it for the door as you will see later.  I don't have a lot of pictures of the rest of the build as I wasn't planning on documenting it in pictures, I usually work better with video.

Originally the idea was to have mesh in the floor for the birds to walk around on so that their mess would all fall through onto the ground, It didn't work out very well as the birds couldn't work out what to do and got all panicky.  I think it was because they didn't feel safe walking around on it, it was not very solid feeling.  I made a removable floor  but then replaced it with a trapdoor.

In the back of the coop there are 2 rails that serve the dual purpose of being something good to life the coop with and they are also the rails that the nesting boxes slide out on.  Originally I was going to have it so that we had to slide it out to check the nesting boxes but that doesn't work out so well with nosey little hens poking around so I made a hinge for the lid above the nesting boxes that you can see in the video I will post later but not in this picture as it was a later modification.

You can also see in the picture above how the water catchment system works.  It has worked very well all winter, I suspect summer will be a little different though.    You can also see in this picture how the door was just a piece of plywood that I cut and put hinges on, it wasn't quite long enough to cover the side and I have some other wood now that I might use to finish it off properly.  We still have a few litres of paint left, it was all free paint from the dump, they have a paint recycling area there that is just great and free paint is just the right price when you have no budget.

The run was made in squares for a variety of reasons, it needed to be configurable, it needed to be easy to replace parts and made to a standard size so that I all parts were interchangeable.  I ended up getting mostly 100mmx200mm wood so to make it go further I split it all down the middle.  This gave me nice strong wood and heaps of it, I decided that 5 cubes worth of run would be a good start and we could always add to it later.  The cubes are not quite 1m squared, they are just slightly wider than a roll of chicken wire so that I only had to cut the roll off in squares and there was no stretching or adding bits.  

This only left me with the problem of fastening them together.  I made up some model bits from scrap wood and tried a few different ideas but eventually I came up with the nails and holes idea, every piece has 2 nails in the top and bottom, one each side and on the sides it has holes for the nails to go in.  I used 120mm jolt head nails which seemed to work really well, they were hard to bend and just the right length to go right through the wood 

You can see the nail and hole on this corner.  This allows me to make this kind of configuration easily, you can see the nails sticking out on each second top square. they alternate directions and lock together really well.  The door was an old cupboard door we found on the woodpile, Shay wanted to be able to feed the hens for some reason so I had to make her a door.  As it turned out we made them a dining hall at a later stage due to a rat problem we had not anticipated.

This was the stage when we got our first chooks.  We started with 5 and they seemed pretty happy with the place.

Here is a video of just before we got the chooks, the roof hadn't been trimmed or nailed on, most of the squares were not done and the floor had not been replaced but you get the idea.

Cheers.

The start of something.

Hiya, This is just going to be a place for me to jot down my projects and ideas so I can organise my thoughts a little.  I will start out by documenting my latest projects and see how things progress.  I have called the blog "Geek to Green" because it will hopefully document my struggle from IT geek to farmhand.

I am going to begin with the chicken coop I have just recently extended while it is still fresh in my head.