Huge break and I come back with this, I know it's not related to the green but its 100% geek.  I am working on my welding skills before attempting to make the sawmill, I have a plan in my head and partially on paper but it will need to be really solid as a thrown or snapped sawmill blade could easily be fatal.  I also have the problem that we have recently moved house which is why I have not updated for ages, I had to upgrade the desk as we are living in a "nice" house now and the desk looked like a piece of crap.

The old desk:

So on with the desk.  I have stripped my old desk down to basics again, done some needed upgrades and a ton of finishing.  I started out by taking the old seat off and cutting the mounting bars and armrests off, then making something smaller for the new seat.  I think it looks a lot tidier now.  I mounted the new seat and discovered that it was sitting further forward than the original seat so I had to extend the desk and make a new monitor mount.  The result is also a lot tidier than the original, even the seat looks like it was made to go there.

I have drilled a bunch of holes throughout the structure for running cables through and lightening the desk.  It has not lightened it as much as I would have liked but it has made the cables a lot tidier.  I also patched all the holes that made it lok untidy then file filed everythin so there were no sharp edges.

I bought some new springs that were far smaller than the original garage door springs I used, perhaps a bit too small as it gets a bit heavy just before it gets to the down position.  I will probably revise the spring system yet and perhaps look at some hydraulic rams or something, I need to find someone to advise me on such matters as I have no idea and imformation is hard to find on such a specific thing.

Once I was happy with the look and performance I wire brushed everything, sanded it, wiped it all down with solvent and painted it with 2 coats of primer and 3 topcoat matte black.

I waited a day and assembled everything and I am really happy with how it looks, although I still need to make a new desk top to replace the one I am using as it is really messy wood and looked so bad that i decided to paint it with everythng else rather than polish and varnish it as I originally intended.  I will buy some nice wood to replacet he desk top with and make the side table that wil hold the mouse cradle, ipod dock, speaker volume controls, USB hub, and a place to put coffee.  The side table is important because if you sit anything on the current desk and decide to get up, it flies into the window behind the desk.

I apologise for my lack of updates but things have been harder to get done now that I am back working full time again, I have 2 days a week to do stuff instead of the 5 that I used to have.  We have just got permission for having chickens at our new house so the next update will probably be when we put them in their new and slightly changed coop.

More Pictures of completed desk here
http://imgur.com/a/dMwCO

Cheers.

Another Raised Bed.

We had a bit of an issue with our fence: it fell over when I slipped down the side of it.  The fence was dividing 2 parts of our property so that the previous owners could keep dogs and not have to fence the entire property, the part that we now keep the chickens in has not really been used much.  We do not have any dogs so this will no longer be an issue for us and as a result of that I have decided to use what parts of the fence that are not rotten to make another raised bed garden.  This will be the first part of a project to make several raised beds and clean up the property a bit and make it more usable, I will post each part as I complete it.

I pulled the fence down, then pulled it apart and removed all the nails.  The wood was old and each board had a lilttle bit of rot in it that had to be removed but I got enough wood out of it to make a good sized garden bed, I decided to make it 2 boards high so that it would sit higher than the second raised bed we are planning to put between it and the sun.

Day One I finished pulling the fence apart and trimming the wood, there was not much time left after that as it took a while to clean it up where I wanted to saw, I don't like my tools being damaged by badly prepared wood.  I had to make all the stakes that I would be hammering in to the ground and make some of the trimmed wood the same length so that the sides would all match up.  I also marked out the outline of the raised bed with builders line so I could get started early the next day, I took no photos sorry.

 The photo below is where I am getting the topsoil from, when the septic system was improved here the guys that were digging it all out put the topsoil in one pile.  The mound in this photo with the nasturtium on it was all nice topsoil, there is a little wood and shingle mixed in there but I think it will be quite usable.

When I finished the original design it didn't feel strong enough so I reinforced it and made bays for the greenhouse covers to sit on in case we need to use them, these bays are also chicken coop compatible so we can fence the chooks into a bay or more between crops to dig around and fertilise it a bit using the squares from the current chicken run.

Day Two I had the basic raised bed made and 2 bays reinforced, I also added a little topsoil in there too as I wanted to get an idea of how long it would take me to finish the job.  By this stage I had 2 days left before it was supposed to rain, I really wanted to have the raised bed full of dirt before the rain so it would get a good soaking before we plant anything

Day Three and I am calling it finished for phase 1.  I finished the raised bed off and it feels really solid now, we do have to add a bag of potting mix and some blood & bone to each bay yet and I think the chooks will help us out with some fertiliser but its finished for the most part.

I think it turned out ok, I will be adding to it later to make it look nicer but I will get the second raised bed finished first and do some fence improvements.  I also will be adding a rail where the 2 concrete posts are, but I will finish the second raised bed first so that they have more support.

Might do some weeding tomorrow before we put the potting mix in actually.

Part of the Plan: CEB Press

I have a house design in mind that borrows somewhat from the Earthship design but I will not be using the rammed earth tyres because of the huge amount of labour involved.  I am planning to make it out of compressed earth bricks because of the great thermal mass and free price of them, they are also considered structural masonry so there's a strength factor too.  There will only be 2 - 3 of us building the house so it will be a long process, we may have to make the bricks one year and put it up the next depending how long it takes us.

I have seen a few press designs and I don't think it will be a problem building a press from them, I am probably going to go with a CINVA type ram, perhaps slightly modified.  The hard part will be making it flexible enough to be able to make 2 - 3 kinds of bricks as well as roofing tiles (I hope).

I am planning to mount the press to a bracket of some kind that will be mounted on the front of the digger, It should provide a very solid base for it as well as keeping it mobile enough to move to where the dirt is.  I will mount it with linchpins or something for easy removal.  If we decide we cant cope with the pressing of the bricks we will also have the capacity for using the hydraulics off the digger to power the mechanics of the press

I am planning to have a go at making the press this summer if I can find enough scrap to put one together.  I have some of the parts already but I will need to find some decent steel plate before I can make too much progress, I will see what I can come up with when summer rolls around.  I would really like to get the press done before we find a property if possible so I can work out what kind of labour will be involved.  If we get the house plan sorted out somewhat we should also be able to estimate the number of bricks needed and extrapolate how long it will take to make everything.  We should also be able to work out how much cement will be required for the CEB bricks so that will help us to get a more accurate idea of price.

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.