Welding In Shorts

Catching up to myself

2011-05-17T19:42:00.000-03:00

Howdy Readers,

I've been a busy guy with life in general and also with making youtube content. I'm more or less on a schedule of a DIY/repair type video every Monday and a Beer Review In A Minute Or Two video every Friday.

If you're not already following me directly on youtube I think you probably should do. Find me here: http:/www.youtube.com/froshmasta Subscribe and be notified immediately about new videos instead of waiting weeks or months here to find out.

Anyway Here's some stuff I've been building/fixing/inventing:

Here's a DIY Chainsaw handle repair I did to make a free saw into an awesome free saw:

This is a video followup about some of my DIY flashlight efforts:

My one-of-a-kind home-built R/C Truck towing the toddler around in a wagon:

My roof sucks so I do a bunch of these DIY shifty roofing repairs:

A quick and boring look at upgrading my garage PC:

This was a fun DIY kiddie slide construction project I did so our little boy could have a sweet slide to play on:

I'm 32 years old and I really have no excuse for this... but it amuses me to pimp up my lawnmower:

I do some photography and videography type things so I made up a DIY photo / video studio light out of mostly garbage:

Wee Heavy Scotch Ale

2011-04-08T12:40:00.000-03:00

It's beer time again! This week we've got an unfortunately seasonal local microbrew from Sea Level Brewery at The Port pub in Portwilliams: High Street Wee Heavy Scotch Ale. Have a seat and grab a beer and drink along with me:

Functional Folk Art?

2011-04-04T12:06:00.000-03:00

What it is?!

Here's another little glimpse into how my brain works sometimes. I saw this old spent fire extinguisher in my stock of goodies and thought:
"I bet my little Kodak Playsport HD camera would fit into that and be safe from flying debris or shrapnel" ...

and then I thought:
"It does fit! but maybe there should be a window so the camera can see out...".

etc, etc.

Anyway... Video:

Keith's comes through with something interesting!

2011-04-01T17:34:00.000-03:00

It's beer o'clock on Friday again!

On the tasting block this week is Alexander Keith's Tartan Ale. A different approach for them and a "Brewmaster's Limited Release". If you like what I have to say about it you'd better go get some to try before it vanishes forever... if you don't like what I say then I guess it's not an issue.
Here's the video:

Big Ole Discarded Death Ray

2011-03-28T22:19:00.000-03:00

Here's a preliminary experiment with something else I dragged out of the trash. I don't think it's actually a real fresnel lens but I don't really know. In any case it's a big magnifying glass that I will definitely be doing some more experimenting with in the future.

Video:

C'mere and Taste This!

2011-03-25T11:07:00.000-03:00

It's Beer Review In A Minute Or Two time again!

This episode features Strong Framboise (Raspberry) Beer from Amsterdam Brewing Co. in Toronto.

My good buddy, Matt, brought this beer to me after it had been sitting for a long time so I'm not sure if it had gone bad or if it started out bad... I've said too much...

Watch the video:

Hedge Hacker

2011-03-21T12:45:00.000-03:00

G'day!

Here's another piece of trashed-turned-treasure that I've been playing with. A discarded Black&Decker cordless hedge trimmer I picked up with no battery. I thought I was going to have to build my own battery pack for it but I found a better way:

Two of my favorite things in one bottle!

2011-03-18T18:03:00.000-03:00

Howdy again, folks!

I'm trying to institute a bit of a video/blog posting schedule. I'm hoping people will like me more if I'm consistent :)

Here's how the schedule looks so far:
On weekends or early in the week I'm going to try to post a video/blog about workshop,
radio controlled things or "fun with science" type subjects. Annnnd fridays are beer review day!

This week was a long time favorite beer that I can't get locally anymore (thanks, NSLC): Young's Luxury Double Chocolate Stout. As usual I'll give you a relatively quick and very nearly informative review in the video below:

Clutching At Cordless Drills

2011-03-13T20:25:00.002-03:00

What's happenin, forum?

Yeah... I just wanted to be like Raywilliamjohnson on youtube there for a minute...

Anyway, if you haven't figured it out by now I like to take stuff apart. Sometimes on a good day these things even go back together and work again. Sometimes not...
In any case I generally learn something and/or injure myself in the process.

My latest quest of knowledge involved the drivetrain of a cordless drill. I wanted to know how the clutch part worked... in fact I wanted to know how to defeat the clutch so I could use the gearbox without it for another project further on down the road.

As per usual I'll do the actual explanation in the video below and you can learn with me for a couple minutes... think of it as edu-tainment!

Don't be afraid of the dark... beers.

2011-03-07T22:29:00.002-04:00

Howdy!
I'm trying a new thing out to better combine Youtube with another of my hobbies: beer. The basic concept is quick and simple beer reviews. Us beer snobs find it way too easy to ramble on about the "nose" of a beer or what every detail on the label says. Basically we tend to bore all the sober people and some of the less sober people pretty badly. That's what my idea is about/for. For the inaugural run of my new review style I'm trying out St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout. That's about all I want to tell you in text form so watch the video for the rapid review:

Stuff I've been doing

2011-02-19T11:17:00.002-04:00

Since I'm home sickly today I have time to fire a note here for the people who might actually look at my blog.

First I did some science with boiling water and cold air:

Then I did a two-part breakdown look at my R/C snowplow truck (and plow) for all the people who are asking about it all the time:
Part 1:

Part 2:

Fortunately my power-nerd buddies Sean and Vic lead me into my next video. They had been fooling around with some thermite and when they set up another round of burnination and invited me along for the event. Good times!:

And final video update: I got a little rambunctious and started added parts to other parts and things and I ended up with a lunatic rechargeable flashlight that happens to be in the shape of a cordless drill:

Tiny helicopter... tiny video camera... HMMMM

2010-12-30T19:50:00.004-04:00

This likely won't surprise anyone who knows me but I took some stuff that wasn't supposed to be put together and put it together... again. This time I didn't even bust out the angle grinder or welder! Just a knife, a little screwdriver, and some tape.

Today's project was one of curiosity. The picture below basically illustrates the thought process in my brain:

What you see there is my little s107 micro chopper being mentally added to an "808 keychain video camera" (google it or check eBay out). I could go through the whole process with you in text but I'd rather just let the video take over from here:

The whirlybird of paradise...

2010-12-29T21:41:00.003-04:00

Christmas has finally come and gone. Santa (my in-laws) brought me a cute and completely unexpected toy this year. No, not one of those. No, not one of THOSE either, good lord! The toy in question is a Syma s107 mini R/C helicopter and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you're a little nerdy and like toys you should probably go to eBay right now and source one up (for about $25cad shipped to your door). Go now. I'll wait here for you.

I had never flown an R/C chopper before this thing arrived so naturally I was expecting mass amounts of carnage and possible injuries. Nope. This thing is as tough as nails and even easier than the super-easy cheap R/C plane I augered into the earth a couple years ago. That was sort of on purpose... I'll tell you that story some other time.

In true YouTube nerd fashion I have hand-crafted an organic, free range video of the included kit and some airborne footage of the wee little chopper for everyone (mostly me) to enjoy:

Video blogs belong in videos.

2010-11-26T10:34:00.002-04:00

I'll accept the fact that I'm basically just another video blogger in the interweb sea of millions of video bloggers... and that fact combined with the fact that my spare time is very slim right now means that I'm going to be going pretty light on the written blogging that usually accompanies my video releases. I'll keep updating the word-blog when I do a video because anyone following me here deserves fair warning like that... but I probably won't do as many big elaborate write-ups for a while.

C'est la vie.

Hot off the harddrive platters today we have a care&feeding video about lawnmowers for all of my fellow turf tamers out there:

Petrolhead playground

2010-10-24T18:01:00.002-03:00

Vroom!

Nestled in the middle of a bunch of farmland and forest just 15 minutes from my house lies a very interesting bit of tarmac, namely a racetrack. Atlantic Motorsport Park(AMP), to be exact. Most of the time this track is dedicated to motorcycle riding and racing which doesn't particularly interest me. For a few weekends of the season, however, the track gets very interesting when it becomes home to Performance Driving School. When this happens the track turns into a car show better than most other car shows. It's a car show where you'll find assorted Porsche and BMW sports cars by the dozens as well as a random smattering of other interesting cars from the Subaru Sti and hot Audis to performance Volvos and Lexuses (Lexii?)

The reason this is a car show better than most others is that the cars are NOT polished to perfection and kept behind velvet ropes. The cars are fetteled and tuned and the owners are learning how to push them to, and sometimes beyond, their limits. It's truly refreshing to see performance cars having the balls driven off of them in a nice controlled environment.

AMP has a website here: http://www.atlanticmotorsportpark.com/ that you can check out for their schedule and other relevant informations.

Here is a video I cut together from bits taken back in august on my super cheapo chinese micro video camera (hence the crap quality):

Ship ahoy!

2010-10-09T21:57:00.002-03:00

I've always been fascinated with boats. They're big and they're heavy and they float anyway. They also aren't confined to roads like cars. Overall, pretty neat things. This fascination, of course, crosses over to my R/C hobby as well. So much so that I've had a couple R/C boats over the years. Well last year I started getting the itch for an R/C boat again. This time I thought I'd go bigger, louder, and home-built.

The boat I'm trying to build is my homage to the Zippkits EasyVee deep vee wooden boat kit. Smart people among you who want to build one of these things... just buy the kit. Doing it really from scratch like I am is stupid and time-intensive. The EasyVee boat is a wooden construction thing about 46 inches long and intended for 2stroke weedeater-sized engine power. The people building these boats "correctly" also use the "correct" R/C-specific engines in them... but those cost money so my intent is to use a real weedeater engine and invent the driveline parts for it. That will take a long time but will save me hundreds of dollars if it works.

For once I had the foresight to get a camera set up BEFORE building the whole project. I have smooshed the pictures into a video so you can really see the progress of the boat from sheets of plywood to a fully formed and resin-sealed hull. That was the easy part. Now I've got some real inventing to do to make her seaworthy. Someday I'll have another update for you. Here is the first video:

A Penetrating Quandry:

2010-09-12T20:39:00.003-03:00

As your friendly neighborhood IT Guy I often find myself in charge of doing away with old hard drives. These are drives that might be bad or that are too old and small to use anymore or what have you. Since your hard drive contains traces of everything you do (even after some software methods of erasing them) it makes sense to me to physically damage drives before recycling them. This helps to ensure no prying eyes go snooping around your data for juicy identity-thefty tidbits.

If you are really very concerned about your data I suggest you software-wipe your drive first with something like Boot&Nuke or any of dozens of similar drive formatting jobbies BEFORE physically trashing the thing for disposal... Well I guess you could try doing that after destroying the drive if you really wanted to. Let me know how that works out for you.

Anyway, to accomplish this sort of mindless physical destruction of computer hardware in a safe and tidy way I decided I would need to create a device. Such a device basically appeared to me in a daydream one day and I got to work as soon as time permitted. The device which may or may not be named The Hard Drive Penetrator is constructed out of the following basic ingredients:

- half of a broken punch (sharpened)
- a hydraulic bottle jack (about $9 on sale at Princess Auto)
- some old steel bed frame rails (pick these up for free at roadside on recycling day or cleanup day.
- a couple hours of cutting and welding

In another stroke of workshop luck I'm fairly pleased with the way my drive killer turned out. It's quiet, clean, easy to use, and does a real number on a hard drive. For your info-tainment please enjoy my video about this thing:

Happy Whacking Day!

2010-08-29T08:20:00.002-03:00

Howdy,

Here's the deal: I busted the flywheel key off in my weedwhacker. Not sure how, but I did. I'll admit it. For those of you not in the know of small engines the flywheel key is what keeps all the inner gubbins synergizing correctly. Without the key the engine will do undesirable things such as: not start, remove skin from your knuckles, and create anger.

This leads to yet another DIY repair by the workshop nutjob himself, me. Naturally the weedwhacker in question was dredged from the garbage and repaired initially... and the spare parts engine was also garbage-picked so this was a no-cost endeavor. No-cost is the best cost.

I'm not going to walk you all through the repair in detail because I suspect most of you don't care and just read my blog by mistake or to humour me. The crux of it is basically that you remove the driveshaft side of the plastic housings to expose the flywheel and then swap it out. This requires the removal of roughly 400 screws for which I definitely lost the proper driver bit some time ago. In the included video I'll show some of the finer points of the swap out as well as say stupid things and make unnecessarily loud noises. Let's go!

Garbage Air: how sweet the smell!

2010-06-13T10:01:00.003-03:00

Hey,
I see a lot of useful stuff getting thrown out. Maybe it isn't useful to the original owner anymore but I find use in some of this stuff. One such happenstance occurred the day I found an 8gal. sized air compressor tank with a busted wheel and missing compressor. The tank itself was solid and undamaged (important for a pressure vessel) so I took it home hoping to make a portable air tank out of it one day. Months passed... no progress. Such is life. Then I found a second smaller discarded compressor thing that had some more interesting parts on it so I took that home as well and the brain-gears started turning.

I had to drop about $3 at the hardware store for threaded pipe fittings and $5 for some tacticool looking flat OD green spraypaint so I did end up spending a little money on the project but it's still pretty low budget.

Long story still long I sanded and painted the tank, pulled the (busted)wheels off it and added the 4 rubber feet off the smaller tank. Then I cut and welded the handle at a more jaunty angle(towards the centre of gravity) to aid in balancing the tank by the handle. I used some teflon thread tape, my hardware store threaded pipe bits, and my straight-out-of-the trash gauges and bits to plug the holes in the tank and add... well... functionality.

I'm pleased with the result. I now have enough portable air to do a little air-nailing, inflate some stuff, even air-out a computer fan or something without busting my hump trying to drag my big compressor around.

I have included a video for my own enjoyment... but you're welcome to have a look as well:

Beer: not just for breakfast anymore!

2010-05-13T20:27:00.005-03:00

Hey,
I've got a confession to make. I like beer. I like it a lot. I'm not much of a drunkard, however, because I like the tastes and textures of beer more than the alcoholic content. I'd rather nurse a good beer or two over an evening than pound back watery pissbeers one after another all night. For whatever reasons I've settled on liking dark beers and have taken to comparing them mentally for ages. Just recently I've decided I should review them out loud just in case anyone else wonders what I think the beer is like. This more public approach to beer reviewing is made simple with this new fangled invention called "the internet". I don't know if this internet thing is going to catch on or not but I rather like it.

Annnnnnnnnyway, the beer in question this time around is Alexander Keith's Dark Ale. As far back as I can recall this is Keith's first foray into dark beers. I think it's great that these big breweries like Keith's and Rickards are getting into the dark beer scene. That should help drive competition in that segment and perhaps lower prices or bring more products to market. All I know is that I want to try them out and I'll let you know what I think of them as I do.

I've decided to take a sort of disgruntled/violent IT Guy approach to the beer video making. Mostly because I get a kick out of it. I hope you do as well. If you haven't already seen it, you should check out my Rickards Dark review in my YouTube videos. Without further futzing about here's the Keith's Dark video:

Zapping a cordless drill battery into submission!

2010-04-27T21:55:00.002-03:00

First and foremost, a disclaimer: NOBODY DO THIS. There that should cover that.

Okay, Here's the backstory: My cordless drill was great for a few years till the batteries tanked out and it turned into an ugly paperweight. After spending my usual too much time on the internet reading about such things I decided I'd juice the crap out of my battery packs with my mig welder to see if that helped.

Initially I did one pack months ago and was so pleased with the result that I saved the other pack to share the experience with you fine folks of the intertubes. You should feel honoured. Or at least less offended than I usually make you.

According to my limited understanding of how the guts of batteries work here is why nicad cells stop working: think of the cell as a bucket of chemical juices with two chunks of metal suspended in it (these connect to the positive and negative terminals). The chemical juices react with the metal chunks and give off magic... or electricity or something. The reason I think they crap out sometimes is because after a lot of this chemical reaction happening a buildup of some byproduct bridges the gap between the metal bits and shorts the sucker out.

Now... that being probably mostly kinda true, here's why the welder helps: My welder on high outputs a little over 30v DC but massive amperage or current. This huge wallop of current blows apart those bridges of crap built up between the internal battery parts and allows the normal chemical reaction to resume in a more appropriate manner. I'm sure there are more qualified people to give proper explanations of this but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

After seeing a few writings about how to do this trick it seemed like a handful of short, evenly paced zaps was the agreed on methodology so as you'll see in the video I zap the battery in that manner. I arbitrarily decided to zap it 10 or 12 times because that "seemed about right".

Long term testing: As I mentioned before I repaired my other drill pack months ago and it works really well. Not as good as brand new, no, but very usable and much better than doling out the green for new stuff. So that's your lesson in DIY for today.

And now for the sure-to-be award-winning video of the battery zapping event:

This weather is bullcrap!

2010-03-28T10:37:00.005-03:00

That's what I think, anyway. Oh well. it can't stay this cold much longer. Luckily it was about 25 degrees warmer last weekend(not even joking) and I got outside to do some mixing of hobbies. I recommend combining some hobbies thusly:

1 garbage-parts rebuilt mountain bike
1 home built bike trailer made mostly of garbage-parts
1 bag of R/C tools, battery packs, etc
and finally
1 stonking big R/C F150 4x4 model.

Through the miracle of the internet I've got one here to show you that I had prepared earlier:

At this point you could probably take a picture, send it to all of your friends, and then unload the gear and go inside for a beer. That's basically cheating though... mostly because I didn't think of it earlier.

My next step was to bike my lardass and my trailer full of gear a few km down the road to the part of the local recreation trail that is all torn up for rebuilding. That tear-upedness is what makes it great for R/C trail driving. Note all of the logs, uneven ground, stumps, etc:

I had a great time moving my camera around my adjustable outrigger mount thing and taking different angled footage of roughly the same path through the terrain over and over. Sadly my uber-cheap chinese knock-off video camera's battery didn't last a terribly long time. I suspect it needs longer charging than I think it does. Before it quit, though, I managed to get a few good runs in and had enough footage to slop together the following bit of video. WARNING: this is not very stable video on account of the camera and my mount. If you get motion sick really easy or you're generally a wimp you might want to go easy on watching this. For everyone else: Don't worry it's only just over a minute long :)

First Person Awesome

2010-03-14T20:39:00.004-03:00

G'day faithful reader(s?),

Once in a while I get the itch to impulse-buy some kinda gadgety thing. This is completely counter to my usual tendency of being tighter than two coats of paint with my money. Thankfully the good people of China seem to churn out bajillions of electronic devices at next to zero cost and sell them on eBay. I recently decided to try a mini digital video camera on a whim and found this little gem for about $19cad shipped to my door:

I think the camera I got is actually a knock-off of the pictured "md80" one but we're not here to judge... especially at a price of $19.

Anyway I wanted this camera to do on-board/FPV video with my R/C trucks and things so today with the help of my buddy, Christian, I took a few R/C truck video clips and I did a little super-amateur video editing to slap them together into this:

Hope you like it. I actually really enjoyed both the making of and the watching of this little movie. I think it shows great potential in the area of cheap on-board video making. I shall pursue this more in the future.

Until next time, Keep yer feet warm and yer beers cold.

The Beer Wall of Fame

2010-03-09T21:18:00.003-04:00

Howdy Gang,

Another short blog entry due to the video doing most of the explaining. For some time now I've been hanging onto beer bottles from beers that I've really enjoyed. Both to honour the beer and also to cater to my hording-stuff nature.

The beer shelf itself is constructed from nice plywood shelving that was bound for the landfill. I've re-purposed this shelving material for use as... shelving material by cutting it to length and ripping it to width. I don't know sweet FA about carpentry or shelf-building so I just used some simple glued and nailed blocks to hold the ends up. I love my air-nailer so very much. To anyone who doesn't have one... get one. You'll find all kinds of uses for it I'm sure. Hell, just nail a bunch of scrap wood together for fun!

Sometime in the variably near future I've got an interesting radio controlled / welding project coming up. I've started work on it but need some supplies to continue. Stay tuned for more beer and beer-fueled projects!

Video:

Relax, have a beer.

2010-02-24T22:05:00.000-04:00

Hey gang,
The weather has been kinda Nova Scotia Wintery so I haven't been doing much outside or in my unheated garage lately. What I have been doing, however, is watching Olympic hockey and drinking beer. This gave me an idea and after I got another beer to drink I had another idea! Why not share some interesting beers with my friends in the intertubes?
So here we go, my maiden voyage beer review:

Little Big Projects

2010-02-13T15:56:00.002-04:00

Howdy,

I've been neglecting my blog. I think that's how blogs are supposed to work. Anyway, here's what's up:

We (mostly my wife) had a baby. A little boy named Daniel. He's terribly adorable and growing at a grand pace. At the time of writing this he is just under 6 weeks old. Since he's largely immobile at this stage I've been taking advantage of any wisps of spare time I can find to do quick little arts and crafts hobby projects. One such project is my newest large-scale radio controlled truck.

Let's call it the "Hemipede" because... well because I feel like it. The ingredients of this one are pretty simple: one huge toy truck body salvaged from the garbage, one working but unloved R/C truck, a pinch of ingenuity, and a hacksaw.

I didn't really photograph this project much along the way so this is how it works: lop the working R/C truck in half in the middle, add a bunch of length to match the wheelbase of the body, nail (or in my case rivet) it together again and adjust the position of the body mounting posts. That's really about it. Even with a great deal of bumbling on my part I knocked this one out in about 3 or 4 hours. The unheated garage at -5c slowed progress somewhat.

Anyway... video:

We got a not-big convoy!

2009-11-28T22:09:00.003-04:00

Howdy,
When I finished my bike trailer project I had some comments and requests in regards to seeing the trailer in action underway and under load. Well to keep all two of my faithful viewers happy I can certainly do that. I did a shot rip up the street and back and made a few mental notes about the trailer:

1. when loaded with heavy stuff, the trailer is heavy.
2. the brakes of the bike work but you need extra time to stop with over 100lbs(trailer+cargo) of extra weight strapped to the bike.
3. on a level bit of road the trailer isn't very noticeable.
4. I get funny looks from people when I leave the garage with any of my contraptions.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the little video. I've got the raw footage shot for a couple other little videos already as well so hopefully I'll have time to process those soon.

Video:

Post-Halloween pumpkin carving

2009-11-09T19:31:00.004-04:00

So I haven't updated for a month. I've been taking care of real life things which seem to keep piling up in a big crap-stack of stress and inconvenience. C'est la vie. I'm updating now for what it's worth...

Being so busy recently I haven't really embarked on any crazy new projects but I've got a couple little bits of business to take care of. First off is Halloween. I carved up some last-minute pumpkins for Trick Or Treat Night and decided to add a little hillbilly flair to dress them up by incorporating a chainsaw that I dug out of the trash. blammo:

So I thought that for a proper sendoff to my faithful pumpkins I'd put a real chainsaw to them before stuffing them in the green bin. The following is the video evidence:

Chainsaws: fun in small packages.

2009-10-09T21:24:00.005-03:00

Chainsaws are loud, smelly, violent, and dangerous little monsters. Pretty much the perfect backyard toy! Now, if you've picked up anything about old Jon here yet you may have noticed that I like to collect up discarded things and make them functional for little or no money. Chainsaws are no different.

I've been watching the "weekly treasures" (aka, garbage and recycling) for a while and have managed to pick up a couple old Homelite saws. I have NOT heard favorable things about this brand but I really don't know anything about chainsaws at all. That doesn't usually stop me.

Allow me to cut to the chase here: The grey/blue saw was found full of the most brutally stale fuel I've ever seen but was completely intact. I emptied the skanky fuel and cleaned out the carburetor a bit and to my surprise the saw started great and ran beautifully. I only had to spend a couple minutes adjusting the high/low needles on it. Now that it ran I discovered that the chain bar was pretty bargain-basement and the chain itself was about as sharp as a bag of wet mice. That brings me to the second saw.

The Red saw was of similar vintage and size to the blue/grey one but appears to have been dropped off of something very tall because the handle is broken mostly off at the two points where it connects to the main body of the saw. In fact if you check out the video you will see how someone even MORE crude than me whacked the thing back together with some wire and tin. It's pretty wobbly and nasty because of this so I didn't even bother running it. I did, however, notice that it had a more aggressive and actually sharp chain which was on a nicer bar that has the little pulley thing at the tip. Told you I don't know anything about chainsaws. :)

A quick swap of the chain and bar resulted in a good working saw for no money and probably about two hours of my time... which we all know is virtually worthless anyway. The only remaining bad part is that the muffler (which is actually just a spark arrestor and not a sound deadener) is pretty rusty and there's a hole in the side of it. I might have to invent some sort of replacement for that.

So... I guess the moral of the story again is that more people should reuse things instead of throwing them out. That said, whoever chucked out this old saw probably has some nice new one now that is half the weight and cuts with twice the power. Oh Well, I don't have a lot of trees to butcher, just the occasional storm-blown arboreal wreckage so I'm fine with a primitive old saw.

Here's the YouTube video evidence:

Project Trailer Trash Completed!

2009-09-29T20:51:00.003-03:00

Howdy, Folks!

I won't bore you with a lot of details about the project in this post because most of that stuff is covered down in the previous post about it. I just wanted to let you know that I'm calling this one finished. I mention in this new video that the trailer is not a lightweight racing machine. I then had to weigh it out of my own curiosity and with the tongue attached it weighs in just over 23lbs. I have no idea if that's heavy or not for a bike trailer but it seems reasonable enough to me.

Since the last post here are the things I've checked off the To Do list to wrap it up:
1. chopped up and welded on some rear reflector mounts
2. added a decent reflector to the right wheel (original was all corrupt from UV punishment)
3. bolted the floor down to the frame
and
4. sorted out the reinforcement for the hitch

Here's a completion/update video just for fun:

Project Trailer Trash

2009-09-26T06:38:00.000-03:00

Yo,

Project Trailer Trash is nearing completion and has been a load of fun so far. Here's the basic story: I found this bike trailer looking like a bag of hammered crap in the garbage but thought the basic frame looked good enough to salvage. Here's how it looked when I adopted it:

As you can see... pretty rough shape. Those side hoop parts that would normally form the roof support for the trailer are NOT supposed to fold down flat like that. It's almost as if some lunatic Ikea worker went on a coke-fueled bender and decided to convert this thing to flat-pack.

All of the nylon/canvassy stuff was weather-rotted and/or ripped so I cut that off and started work on the bare steel frame. There was a fair bit of stomping, pulling, and hammering to make the frame mostly straight in most directions but it came around. After getting it shaped up I did some repair welds in a few places and also shortened the centre crossbar because of how I was going to mount it... My welds must be getting better because I cut 3 inches out of the middle of that bar, welded it back together, and it would take my weight right on top of the weld.

Axle mounting was a major re-engineering job. The crushed original wheels had stupid proprietary axles so all of that original stuff had to go. In it's place I've fitted a couple of chunks of angle iron (bed frame rails from the garbage), a 26" steel mountainbike fork that has been split in half (from a garbage bike), and a couple of 20" alloy replacement wheels off of some other garbage bikes. This part is detailed in the video much better than I could do with text.

Once the frame was sorted out I turned to the hitch. I had seen other DIY builders online use lots of combos of the hardware I used for a hitch so I used several different ideas to employ whatever I had laying around for my hitch. The end result is here:

A swivel caster, an air-hose connector, and the end off of an air hose (from the garbage). It's almost self-explanatory but to get a real feel for how it works check it out in the video I'll post here somewhere.

I slapped together a plywood load floor out of some scrap wood and am now deciding how to mount it to the frame. Engineering has stopped at this point for some paint work to pretty the trailer up. I'll hopefully have another update soon showing the trailer completed and in action.

Happy building and biking!

VIDEO:

My Blogger.com maiden voyage.

2009-09-18T13:22:00.000-03:00

Hello world?
I'm speaking to you from one of my favorite places: inside the internets. My other favorite place is my garage where I spend countless misguided hours tinkering, inventing, destroying, and otherwise messing about with tools and junk. Most of what I use or work on comes out of the garbage. I think I have some kind of sick fascination with reworking and reusing things that other people have thrown out. It might be because I'm cheap and free stuff is more fun than stuff I had to pay for.

In any case This blog and the accompanying YouTube video channel are going to serve as a visual documentation of some of the foolish stuff I waste my time on out in the garage.

We'll start this little journey with a bit about one of my shop tools: 4.5" angle grinder. One of my favorites in the arsenal. Some time ago the plastic handle broke off so I epoxied it back together and got another few months out of it till the inevitable happened and it went all to crap permanently. I looked around the shop and saw a new handle laying in wait. A little bit of wire wheel in the drill and a touch of mig welding later and I had the following new and very strong handle:

Yep. That's a railroad spike from an abandoned section of rail. That's how I roll. If you like that, stick around. We may just get along. Check out my YouTube channel over here: Froshmasta on YouTube