Inexpensive Recycled Clock

With New Years just about here and most of us thinking about time, I thought that this might be a good time to highlight this project...

I needed an interesting clock for the music room so I went to Goodwill and bought the cheapest and ugliest looking clock that they had that still ran.  I removed the hands and clock mechanism and recycled the rest.  I then made a design and cut it out of 1/4 inch plywood and painted the clock with black spray paint and the hands with grey.  I attached the clock mechanism and reattached the hands.  A series of white sticky backed cut outs were used to denote the hours and now the recycled clock once again accurately tells the time!

Wooden Bookmarks

Here is a quick and simple project that makes good use of leftover lumber.  Take a piece of scrap wood and profile it to the size of bookmark that you would like to make.  Make a curved cut through the piece and glue a thin strip of a contrasting color of wood between the two pieces.  Once this has dried, make another curved cut through the block and piece together more contrasting woods.  The resulting block can be cleaned up and then cut into individual bookmarks.  Finish with shellac and you should get many bookmarks from each blank.. These make excellent presents and take little time and materials to make.

Lefse Sticks

This Christmas I made Norwegian Lefse flippers for all the folks that get together with us to make the large amounts we go through as a family during the Christmas season.  These are made from cherry and finished with food safe oil.  The blanks are cut out with a taper that goes from about 1/8 inch at one end to around a half inch on the other.  The width of the sticks is a little under an inch.  The handles are left square and the working end is rounded over.  I used a wood burner to make a design in the handle to dress them up a little.  We just used these for the first time and they worked really well.  The food safe oil finish didn't stick to the rolled out lefse and should make for easy finish renewal if they should need it in the future.

How to make brass cannons without a metal lathe

Sadly the photos for this post were lost when the original Model Ship World forum went down.  You can still follow these directions and make fine cannon...

Start off with round stock of appropriate diameter and mark off the locations of the rings, steps and cascabell. Chuck up the stock and use the bed of the drill press as a guide for cutting slots of the appropriate depth with a file. Use a wrap of paper to protect the drill press bed from the file and check frequently with a calipers till the exact depth is reached.


Cut all of the blanks at one time and resist the temptation to finish a cannon off first. This will help ensure maximal uniformity between cannon.


Once all of the depth cuts are made, connect the cuts to form the appropriate inclines for the various steps. Leave the rings at full diameter.


With the rings at full diameter the cannon can be set into a "V-block" to drill out the trunnion holes as per the plans.


Finish off the rings, cascabell and muzzle of the cannon before making an almost complete parting cut with a razor saw while on the drill press. I did this because I didn't want to take any chances in messing up the muzzle.


Complete the cut off of the drill press and mark the center of the muzzle with an awl. Carefully drill the bore of the cannon paying strict attention to keeping the bore centered on the muzzle.


Here is the final product. It took about three to four hours to make these nine pounders (1:48 scale) by this method. These cannon will not be exact duplicates but turned out well. If you don't have a metal lathe but do have a drill press and some time, this technique can be used in a pinch.

Spray Booth

This is one of my most used tools in the work shop.  It is a combination spray booth and dust extractor.  A section of steel dryer venting connects the unit to an outside vent when it is used as a spray booth and a second set of filters in inserted into the front opening of the unit when it is used as a dust extractor.  In dust mode the unit is not vented to the outside but rather recirculates the air in the workshop through the double filters and pulls all of the suspended dust out of the air.  Plans for designing a booth can be found at the Spray Booth Design Page.  There is a light on the top that shines through a piece of plexiglass to illuminate the booth.  One important point to bear in mind is that many of the paints that we use can be explosive if the vapors reach a spark so having the motor isolated from the air path is critical.

Minty Fresh Guitar Preamp Project

This is a pre-amp for my guitars. The new acoustic pedal that I plan on using in the praise band requires a pre-amp to boost the signal. As always, the Altoids tin gives this amp a minty fresh sound.

This amp is built using JFET so the signal is very clean and has a nice tube like sound to it. There is a boost switch on the board that enables a bypass capacitor that increases the gain by a factor of two so the output goes up quite a bit when this is engaged.

 

British Phone Box Model

My wife and I lived in England for around six months back in the early 90’s and she loves old British Phone boxes so I decided to make her one this Christmas. 

I found photos on the internet that I scaled to 1:12 so the model is around eight inches tall. There are over a hundred dados and rabbets in the model so a high precision table saw was critical. The top is carved out of basswood and lined with foil as a reflector. A master crown was carved out of basswood and a mold made for casting the four crowns out of resin. The “PUSH”, “PULL” plates and the front of the A/B box are made from etched brass. The door pull was made by drilling a recess in a piece of maple and using a matching ball bearing to deform the brass to form handle. The hinges were hand made to scale from brass and the lighting consists of four high intensity white LEDs. These have appropriate resistors to limit amperage and are powered by a six volt battery pack recessed into the base. LED’s were chosen to limit heat. The “TELEPHONE” signs are 10/1000 sheet styrene with homemade decals applied to the front. The phone is carved from basswood with a brass dial. The posters and emergency dial instructions were scaled down from artwork graciously sent by Tony from Unicorn Kiosk Restorations in the UK. The tops of the phone book stands were gilded with silver leaf.