Catching up to myself

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

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?

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!

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

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!

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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

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!

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:

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!

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!

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!

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: