Category Archives: DIY

DIY, Health & Fitness, Homesteading, Off Grid, Ramblings, Sustainable

The passing of 2015

20150222_1436272015 has been an interesting year. You could say it was full of weird and wacky adventures, loss, sadness, backsliding and headaches. It has also seen some forward progress, accomplishments both personal and professional, and a lot of forward momentum on future planning.

The pic is from our vacation/scouting trip up to Klamath Falls, Oregon back in February. It was a great trip. We had a lot of fun and it helped set a lot of things in motion for our future.

I’m not really sure what it all means but 2016 promises to be a big year of change. Tammy and I are already working on getting fit. She has been doing Weight Watchers and hopping on the treadmill. I have been working on getting back to Paleo and tredmilling as well. I am also getting back to isometric strength training. The fitness kick is more than a general health looking in the mirror thing, it is in preparation for moving forward with homesteading plans.

We have talked about it for years and I have been studying a variety of subject areas. I am now well versed in alternative construction techniques and permaculture design, though there is always more to learn and I am by no means an expert. I am versed in a wide range of sustainable systems for the homesteading environment and I am excited to get building.

Gardening has presented the largest challenge. Our 6′ x 10′, west facing, covered, patio space is not even close to ideal. We have had better luck keeping plants alive inside than outside. A while back we resigned ourselves to holding off on building the gardening skills until we are in a more rural environment with enough ground space for a full kitchen garden.

I have been studying up on Hügelkultur, permaculture soil building and earthworks, pioneering plants, cover crops and general land rehabilitation. Depending on the site, it is likely that the first year or two will be spent more on soil development than anything else.

We have also been working on our food preservation skills. Tammy has been getting into canning, mostly jams and jellies. I just finished canning four pounds of jalapeño peppers which filled eight pint jars that are now cooling. Over the spring and summer I dried a lot of Serrano pepper from the three pepper bushes I was able to grow on the back porch. I am hoping to do more soups and veggies in the coming months.

Speaking of food… the livestock issue is one where we are pretty much complete novices. I have had a little experience with rabbits and chickens but that was over 40 years ago. Based solely on our regular food patterns, raising chickens is pretty much a must. Anything else would be more a function of site.

Soil needs, available resources, what the site can support, structures, and systems, these are all site dependant and since we don’t have a site yet, we are at an impasse in these areas. Over the last few years we have been acquiring the foundation information and resources to get started. With this in place we are turning our focus on doing what we can do, close out debt, save as much as we can, and focus on getting property.

So that’s where we are, looking for land.

Until next time,
~FlyBoyJon

DIY, Jewelry Work, Projects, Sustainable, Tools, Woodworking

Fall fell, or did it?

What crazy weather we have been having the last month or so. The daily high temps could have been anywhere from 60 to 100! Now it seems the weather is shifting into the more normal fal pattern, and we sure could use it. I believe we are at the bottom of the medium drought cycle and on the recovery side of the long cycle, but who really knows these days. The weather models have been “adjusted” so many times lately I don’t think anyone really has a handle on the changing patterns.

20150920_141131Besides all the weather stuff… I had posted about all of the seasonal movies in our que, promptly after making that post and settling in for some movie time, the TV let some of the magic out. It appears that it was just the internal power transformer but I have been playing hobb trying to get parts, so we ended up getting a new set so I can spend some more time on the repair. Best laid plans I suppose. I will post a follow up on the movie list later as well as a follow up on the TV progress.

BTW: When selecting a new TV, or any consumer electronics for that matter, make sure you buy a real name brand, Sony, Magnavox, Samsung, etc., someone who has a large product line and has been around for a while. Someone with a reputation to be concerned with and a supply chain that requires conformity. If you want to give an off-brand or small-house product a go, make sure you can get service documentation (schematics, diagrams, parts lists, troubleshooting tips) before you buy, and hang on to it. You or your repair person may need it.

Apex Digital is a crap manufacturer and documentation on their products is basically unavailable. Parts are also unavailable unless salvaged off of used boards, and even then are a crap-shoot. Within the same model I have found numerous incompatible parts changes, and no one can get component parts. Very few sources can even get board level replacements.

20151001_105529Moving along, I have been busy with woodworking projects for work. I have been wanting to build an built-in rent-drop for years. We started out with a basket on the wall inside the mail slot then progressed to putting a bookcase/cabinet in front of the slot with a hole cut out of the back and a basket on a shelf. After almost 20 years I finally got to destroy the bookcase/cabinets I hated build this built-in fixture. So far we are very happy with the results.

Along with the day-job stuff we have been working a some other projects that necessitated buying a few tools. Gee darn, I hate buying tools. The first two are a dapping block and a disc punch cutter. These have been on my list of jewelry tools for many years, I just never could justify them. With our current project list there are several items that need these tools. Some are jewelry related and some are for hardware and findings. Another tool I have been coveting for a very long time is a rolling mill. This one was a bit pricy but I found a deal for about a third of the usual cost. We both decided that was the Universe saying it’s time to add this tool to the round up.

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20150922_165018While I was at it I managed to make another tool I have been waiting on for no apparent reason, a jeweler’s fork, or as it is more commonly known, a bench pin. I’m not sure why I waited so long to make one, but here it is.

After getting the tools in place I worked on a few test projects and was reasonably happy with the results. Two copper rings, one with an aircraft rivet, a copper button, and a practice go at a cross-peened leaf which is a component to something as of yet undecided.

I like working copper, particularly recovered/recycled copper. There is so much you can do with it. The leaf and solid ring were made from old copper pipe, the riveted one was made from some salvage electrical wire, and the button was made from some fourth-hand scrap copper sheet.
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While in the groove I also “recovered” some tool steel from some old screwdrivers and annealed them so I can turn them into some jewelry tools before re-hardening and tempering them. Another simple tool build was a pack of sanding sticks.

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The last thing on the list is my continued studies for my Commercial Radio Tech license. I passed on of the three a couple of weeks ago and plan on taking the big one next week. I will follow up with the third, which is for an endorsement, later on in the month.

That’s it for now, until next time,
~FlyBoyJon

DIY, Ethics, School, Tools

No Industrial Arts, No Industry

I was reading an article from The American Thresherman (December, 1907) Every boy ought to know how to drive a nail and saw a board,  okay, I wasn’t reading the article in the journal, I was reading a copy of it on Lost Art Press’s blog http://blog.lostartpress.com/2014/01/31/how-to-fit-up-a-boys-workshop/ and a few thoughts came up at several levels that I felt compelled to share.

shop classOn the surface, there is the gender point. I firmly believe that this article is very relevant to today’s youth and this absolutely includes girls as well as boys. When I was in Jr. High shop class I don’t recall seeing more than one girl in any shop class, if any at all, and I always thought it was odd. I knew many girls who would have liked, and excelled in the different shop classes. I do recall being informed later, and on more than one occasion, by female friends that they would have taken shop classes but were ether told they couldn’t, or where strongly discouraged to by school staff. I believe unequivocally that girls should be in shop classes of all kinds if they want to be there, and they should be encouraged at an early age to pursue whatever interests them. I may be a cranky old fart, but gender bias in education is just ignorant.

In Jr. High I took a different shop class every semester. Wood Shop, Mechanical Drawing, Plastic and Metal Fabrication, and Wood Shop II, and in High School I took of Auto Shop. I learned a lot from those classes and not just the basics of manipulating tools and materials. They taught me the importance of method and procedure, analytical skills, situational awareness, and of course tool use; by tool use I am not just talking about how to swing a hammer, I am talking about finding the right tool for the job, making the right tool if you don’t have it, and understanding how using the right tool affects outcomes. These are life skills not just shop skills.

Industrial Arts, as it was known before its virtual disappearance from primary public education, was one of those rare PC, aggrandizing terms that was actually well chosen. As school budgets decrease and programs are cut there are outcries of “save the arts,” and there should be, the arts are a very important part of development. Each student benefits from some form of the arts in their own way developmentally. Many studies have been done exclaiming the benefits of art programs; visual arts, musical arts, theatrical arts… but what about Industrial Arts, the same benefits come from taking Industrial Arts classes.

Shop class has often been the butt of jokes and used as a derogatory reference much like jock by the academically adept. Sadly, “Shop Guy” didn’t get the alternative peer respect that jock did, even though historically, and somewhat ironically, jocks often relied on shop classes to keep afloat as far as grades were concerned. Now we are in the Information Age, the Poindexter’s are calling the shots. For the record I was both a shop guy and a psudo-poindexter, I was in chess club, the Domino Club, the D&D club, and an AV guy, I just didn’t have the 4.0 GPA. 

So what happened to Shop Guy/Gal after the programs shut down? In short, they didn’t seem to get much of a chance to learn those skills, or discover that’s what they are good at, or who they are. There is something out there for Shop Guy/Gal, but they will be hard pressed to find it in traditional channels before college and even then it is very limited.

Industrial Education or Career Technical/Technology Education (CTE) as it is known in community college circles, is very limited and focuses mostly on nursing and cosmetology with few resources for other shop-type programs. Most community colleges have only one shop-type program and it is usually tied to a certificate program. Examples would be Automotive Repair, Welding, Machine Tool Operator or CNC Machine Operator, and Aviation Maintenance Technology.  These are, as the department title indicates, Career Technology types of programs so they are not particularly useful for the average person unless they are planning on that specific career path. So in reality these are not shop classes in the primary education sense and that’s what I’m focusing on here.

I can’t think of one local community college that offers anything comparable to the shop classes found in primary education only a few decades ago. This decline of shop classes occurred rapidly beginning in the late 80s with the introduction of personal computers and by the early 2000s shop class was pretty much a goner, technology had overrun Industrial Arts. As shop classes went away other things happened as well. Those kids who relied on shop class for a grade, they didn’t have a resource or outlet anymore and many dropped out. Those entering school after shop class was gone, they never had the opportunity or resource to learn the skills a shop class would have provided, skills that are practical, transferable, and social. Technology took over the job-skills classes and programs and if you weren’t interested in computer science or up to the challenge, there really wasn’t much else for you.

There are no studies that I am aware of that show a direct correlation between the demise of shop class and an increase in crime or dropout rates but I believe there is some connection. Certainly the loss of shop classes is not responsible for all of society’s ills, but like other arts, there are important skills that are being lost to our society as a whole. In just one or two generations those once common basic tool-use skills have declined dramatically. Ask the average teen today how to use a basic hand tool and you get an odd look, ask them how to use a shop tool and, well, they just look puzzled because they have no idea what language you are speaking or what the object is you are pointing at.

At present the DIY and Maker movements are where basic tool-use skills are being acquired. YouTube contributes more to basic tool-use education than all traditional education institutions at all levels combined. While this is great from the perspective of keeping these skills alive, there is little if any feedback on how well those skills are being understood and applied. Without feedback it becomes difficult to develop skills further, errors begin to compound, and at some level the wheel keeps getting re-invented, frequently. Mr. Stumpy the three fingered shop teacher may not have been the most congenial guy in the world, but he did know the importance of the guide bar on a band saw and its proper adjustment, from personal experience no less, and he would most definitely give you feedback.

I am all for keeping music programs, art classes, and theater programs I just think industrial arts, and more importantly the individuals likely to have been in shop class as well as society as a whole have been short changed by the loss of Industrial Arts programs in primary education. If we as a nation want to reclaim some of our manufacturing prowess, restore “Made In USA” to its former status around the world, and improve our import/export ratio, we better start thinking about how the next generation is going to learn  basic tool use and those important underlying lessons shop class can provide.

Yes, education with strong math and science skills is very important for the nation to remain competitive in the world market as a whole, but let’s face it folks, not every kid is suited for a job in science or technology. The system is trying to push every kid down that road with “no child left behind” even if that is not where he/she is best suited. We can’t all be Rhodes Scholars, and that’s fine. It wouldn’t mean much if we all where now would it? Everyone can benefit from shop skills, not everyone has that shop-gene. Some people are good at shop, some aren’t. Some are good at science, some aren’t. Let people be good at what they are good at. Give them the chance to find what they are good at. That’s what High School is supposed to be about, finding something you are good at or at least interested in. If not in High School, then Community College. Industrial Arts needs to reemerge from the darkness in early education for everyone’s benefit. By Industrial Arts I’m talking about basic shop-skills classes, general tool-user classes, not career specific classes, the kind of class that has deeper life lessons.

To those who don’t know me personally, even to some who do, this may come as a shock, but I didn’t take a single math class in High School. The highest level math I had in primary schooling was in Jr. High and in shop class. It was relevant and had a purpose. Over the course of my life I have had to add to my math knowledge as I acquired new skill sets that relied on mathematical operations or concepts I wasn’t familiar with, I had to learn them on my own. Fortunately I have not had issues understanding math in practical applications. In fact, I understand the mathematical relationships in many areas very well. I credit the basics I learned in shop class along with the shop skill of seeking out the right tool for the job. I would not be who I am today without the benefits of having taken shop classes; not just having the tool-user skills, but deep down who I am.

Please forgive a little sappy self-reflection here, but I think this is important, at least it is to me. This post has become something more reflective than I expected.

It is said that we develop our basic personal identity early in our formative years. For me, I can trace a vast majority of who I am today, what is relevant to me as the person I am now, the beliefs I hold, and the major aspects of my character, to three associations outside of my family. First and second were tied closely together, the church I grew up in, and scouting. The third, and I mean this in all honesty was shop class; not the class itself but the deeper level of things I learned in shop. Church and scouts gave me the “moral compass” to guide me. Scouts and shop gave me an ethical, practical, and physical sense of the world and how to approach it, to function in it.

I don’t expect that others will feel as strongly as I do about the importance of Industrial Arts education, but I sincerely hope that if you benefitted from shop class, any shop class, and you have tool-user skills at any level, pass those skills on.

If you are a parent, mentor, or teacher encourage your charges to explore shop-type skills when they show an interest in them.

If by chance, you are involved in curriculum development or program development for primary education or community college education, think about the case for providing basic Industrial Arts programs and help bringing them back to public education. Everyone benefits from basic tool-use skills and more importantly the deeper level of skills that can come from shop class.

~FlyBoyJon

Aviation, DIY

Knowledge tests done

Stearman wing rib jigOn Monday, June 4th I went down to Ocean Air Flight Services with my classmate Rob where we took our General and Airframe knowledge tests passing them both handily. With that behind us the next step is to head out to Byron Airport, again with Rob, and take the practical for General and Airframe which we already have scheduled for Tuesday, June 12th.

Today I took the day off from studying, got side tracked by a little “work”, then got to take a few hours of mental relaxation and headed down to the shop to work on the Stearman wing rib jig I started working on back on May 29th.

Working on the Stearman wing rib jigI started off by trimming the blocks I milled the other day down to the right size. After trimming things down a bit, I gathered the rest of my materials. With brass tack nails, glue, and a couple of hand tools on the jig board I got started nailing the blocks into place.

After a few hours of tacking and gluing the blocks in place I had almost all of the inside blocks in place and nailed down. There are just a couple of blocks left on the interior to install then I get to extrapolate the nose-block and figure out how to block the furthest aft vertical truss piece. That last item is going to be interesting because there is no room to block in the piece with the gussets in the way on the sample rib I have.

I learned a few things while doing this today; the most important of which is to not hold out on the good lumber for the jig blocks. Another thing is that lots of small blocks is much better than fewer large blocks. While your at it, if you use a good medium/hard wood, take the time to pre-drill the blocks. As it is, there are 73 blocks on the inside (or will be anyway) and I am estimating 60 blocks on the outside, that’s a total 133 blocks for this wing rib jig.

Were I to start over on this one, I would take a lot of time to pre-cut, pre-drill, sand, and set nails in 250 or more 3/8″ x 3/8″ x 5/8″ long blocks of Douglas Fir. In fact, I am sure I will be doing another jig sometime in the near future so I think once this jig is done, I am going to prefab a box of 500 or more jig blocks. Of course to fabricate that many blocks I will need to build a jig-block jig to make all of them. 😉

☮ ♥ ✈
~FlyBoyJon

DIY, Energy, Sustainable

Electric Cars

I watched the documentary “Who killed the electric car?” a couple of days ago. If you are interested in electric cars, alternative fuels or alternative power generation I highly recommend this film.

Who killed the electric car?<soapbox> I fully admit I have no love for the Big Three US auto manufacturers, for a variety of reasons. Aside from their being among the largest conglomerates in the country, aside from the perverted, incestuous, and deep multi-layered collection of sub companies, aside from their talent for destroying small businesses, aside from their historical penchant for buying new technologies that could revolutionize transportation from small businesses and developers and hiding it from the rest of the world for decades or just destroying it outright, aside from all of that… I just don’t like what passes for ethics in there world. </soapbox>

Any project that can lead to the development of personal or public transportation vehicles or systems is worthwhile in my book, whether for personal or public development. Anything we can do that will be good for the environment, reduce costs for users, and take a chunk of change out of the pockets of the Big Three at the same time, thats just awesome.

There are small businesses in nearly every large metro area that can convert ANY car into an all electric car. It’s a three-fer; supporting small business, recycling a car, and removing a gas burner replacing it with an electric! The down side here is the cost, a complete change over to a plug-in electric is about $15,000. There are DIY option for this though. Batteries and the right electric motor are still expensive but the prices are coming down. A gear head with five or six grand could effectively do a home conversion.

Since I am low in the cash department, I was looking at the TruckBike as a starting point. Human powered, converting to human-electric, then on to electric. After some deeper thought on the subject I am starting to think skipping the human-electric phase. Building a plug in just might be easier than trying to work out the bugs in the human interface portion; just a thought.

Not everyone is up for a build project, and not everyone is able to cover the up front costs of a conversion. There is a burgeoning movement however of people finding creative ways to finance a conversion project when they need a new car. Think about it, if you have the credit to go out and buy a new car, you should be able to get a loan to finance the conversion, it’s cheaper that buying a car, so the payments are lower. There are some grants and other incentives from the fed, state and some local municipalities that may lower the initial investment. After that, monthly operating costs are going to be lower and regular maintenance costs are going to be substantially lower. It just might be worth the research if owning an electric car is something you are interested in.

Most estimates put the break-even on a electric conversion at around three years. With fuel costs what they are and maintenance on an aging car, it’s not that hard to see the payoff, and that is strictly looking at the money side. From an ecological perspective it makes a big difference.

Anecdotally, I heard a story about a person who got an all-electric conversion on there BMW. To go one step further, they installed a high quality solar array on their garage roof, including an energy storage system. The whole thing cost a little over $50K. For that they got a completely refurbished BMW and… the solar provides all of the energy for the car, as well as a significant portion of their home electric needs. No more gas stations and you energy bill cut in half. Now thats a payoff!

Until net time,
~Jon

DIY, Energy

TruckBike

One of my goals for 2011 is to decrease my fossil fuel use from driving by 50%. Since a portion of electric power generation on the grid is from fossil fuels, the only way I can really track my usage is by switching to some kind of Peddle Power for short trips and errands around town.

My criteria for practical Peddle Power is a vehicle that is fast enough to ride/drive in town, easy to use, easy to maintain and repair, can carry a rider/driver and at least one passenger along with a dozen bags of groceries or similar load, a vehicle that can be ridden/driven day or night, and safely in mildly inclement weather. What I want to build is a test-bed platform that is usable and easily modifiable, something I can tweak and tune into a functional long-term alternate transportation solution for my family. Enter The BikeTruck!

The biketruck is nothing new by any means. On this page about Chinese Three Wheelers, you can see several examples of motorized and non-motorized versions of the biketruck.

What I am planing to do is start with a base platform like the biketruck in the picture over on the right, and expand from there. A significant part of the project is to change the direct chain drive into a Peddle Powered alternator that charges a battery which in turn powers a high torque electric motor; essentially proving a consistent level of resistance for the peddler while making variable power available for the vehicles speed control and assisted breaking, including a reserve for up hill or rugged terrain that would require more power than the alternator may be able to put out. This could also include a power return to leach some power back into the system when going down hill. Ideally the system will be a simple one, using off the shelf parts or re-purposed parts whenever possible. It needs to be user-serviceable by the average person with minimal hand tools and skills.

Building the biketruck’s frame should be fairly straight forward, though I would expect it to be a bit more than the average person will want to do themselves. I think the most difficult part will be tuning the electronics and increasing efficiency. In truth I am not so concerned with making this a hyper efficient vehicle as I am with making it a functional and versatile one. That is the root of it all, functional and versatile, simple and user maintainable, in short sustainable and self sufficient.

I am in the early phase of another project right now, a big project at that, but I think I can slide some time in on this project here and there. First thing is to find parts, bicycle parts, tube steel, sheet metal, what ever. That means as far as this project is concerned, it’s time to scrounge. I am going to try and do the entire project with donated and re-purposed materials. That means this is a $0 project, there will be some money spent in consumables during the build, but that’s it. One of my tasks for getting parts is to start a wishlist page here on the site and a project page. Both will be up before next weeks post. I am also going to start posting in the wanted section of Craig’s List for parts donations once the aforementioned pages are up.

Until next time,
~Jon

DIY, Sustainable

Disposable Society

In many areas of my life I use tools. All kinds of tools. In a conversation about tools and their repair, someone mentioned that tools purchased from Harbor Freight and similar retail outlets are disposable in general. It made me stop and think a little.

A few years back, I worked for couple of companies repairing tools, so for me the idea of just chucking tools without even looking to see what the problem is seems strange. There is some truth to the disposable statement though. The number of people in our society who are Fixers is a lot lower than it was in decades past. Go back in time 2 generations, 70 years or so, and you will find that the average American was a Fixer of one sort or another.

Now I want you to take your Political Correctness Glasses off for a second and absorb the scene that follows.

Dad gets home and finds dinner on the table and mom’s clothes iron on the counter.

Dad: “Iron not working?”
Mom: “Stopped working while I was ironing your shirts.”

Looking a little concerned

Dad: “Have a shirt for tomorrow?”
Mom: “Yep. Only got half way through though.”
Dad: “I’ll take care if it after dinner.”

Aside from the gender-roll type-casting here, lets look at the point I am getting at. It was common for someone in the household to fix, or at least try to fix, stuff when it stopped working. The important key phrase in that statement is stopped working, not broke, stopped working. It was a time when American Made was more common than not and the spirit of American Ingenuity was strong in a large segment of the population.

Our economy has changed. Over the years society has demanded cheaper products. The way industry met those needs was to buy parts, materials and finished goods from overseas. Not to beat that horse, but we started killing our own economy when we traded in our producer status to become a consumer society.

Products became so cheap that it is often more financially feasible to chuck the broken product rather than repair it when it stopped working. The distinction between the two is important and relevant, it demonstrates a change in our collective attitude and thought process as we became a consumer society.

What seems to have happened is that our group consciousness lost the desire to fix. More truthfully it seems that the need to fix has changed from a physical practice to an intellectual one. We are always trying to fix the species, fix the environment, fix other societies, we now fix things in the socio-political sense rather than fix our own stuff when it stops working.

If the average American who replaced one power tool of some kind once a year decided to repair a tool just once, before giving it to someone else who was willing to repair it at least once before replacing it, landfills across the nation would have some 20 million fewer tools in them in just 3 years. For those of you counting, at an average of 3 pounds per tool, that’s about 30,000 tons of mostly non-biodegradable waste. That is a big impact just from repairing before replacing.

Many of us are tired of the consumer society and the disposable mentality that goes with it. It’s not just about materials recycling, its about extending practical usage in the first place. A segment of the population that is making a lot of headway in the area of the re-use and re-purposing of things and materials is the DIY movement. All those Makers out there rekindling the spirit of American Ingenuity. It’s that DIY spirit that can return our society to a more balanced one, somewhere half way in between consumer and producer. There is also a continuing interest in crafting, from jewelry and fiber arts to a resurgence of blacksmithing, just to name a few. All of these movements are demonstrations that sustainability and self-sufficiency are worth reaching for, and people are thinking about it.

Now, off the soap-box and back to the reason I went down this road in the first place. My comment to the person that got me thinking about all of this was simple. If you look at the paperwork that came with the tool you will find that it usually includes an exploded view drawing of the tool and a parts list. A lot of tools, including inexpensive ones, are repairable if you are willing to do the repair. It is true that they are not generally cost effective to take to a repair center, but spending $7 and an hour of your time to repair a $70 tool that stopped working can be, this goes for other things too, not just tools. It is all up to you.

I choose to repair whenever possible. I am also choosing to take a little time to make sure that products I buy are repairable as well. Repairing tools and appliances is not for everyone, but some people like me actually enjoy digging into a tool and the satisfaction of having brought it back to life. If you don’t like doing that kind of stuff, maybe you know someone who does.

Being a Fixer is just one lane along the 12 lane highway of sustainability and self sufficiency. I chose to use this lane whenever I can, how about you?