I’ve got a spring reel type thingy on the upstairs bathroom window, and honestly I prefer sash weights. The springs resonate like unpleasantly mistuned guitar strings and it’s got more thermal bridging from the exposed metal.
But the one I’ve got is around 50 years old, so it might have been awesome 20 years ago, and you might be able to buy much better ones nowadays…
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We did a job of replacing sash weights with the springs back when I worked for the window repair company, and I must agree. The springs just seemed a little flimsy in the 90s.
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Sniping is the bane of my planing existence. The only answer I have found is also, to make sure the board is a little longer than I need, and trim off the end. It’s usually only the last 2-3 inches, and I am usually planing recovered barn wood and such, so the ends are usually pretty ragged anyway.
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Wow, last post i made on this project was September… can’t say I’m not good at slacking off!
The shelves are in, and I finally got around to making the doors for the vanity. First raised panel doors I’ve ever made.
Not perfect, but they should do the job!
I’ll post another update when they are stained and installed.
Side note: more run-of-the-mill router bits from harbor freight can get the job done if you’re not using them heavily, and so can these. But the stile and rail bits didn’t match, and the panel bit may have been a bit more out of balance than i would have preferred. Long story short, if i make doors again, I’ll buy a set from a more reputable company and pay the price for quality.
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The rope seems to be cotton braid, but it’s so covered in paint it’s hard to tell. I’m trying to be gentle.
Meantime, when you take the vinyl siding off an old house to restore the underlying wood siding, in hopes of making the rotty old porch nicer, you find fun things. This was probably the door that led out to the outhouse and water well (note: uncomfortably close to each other) before the first bathroom was installed in the 1890s.
Now there’s a bathroom behind this, and a toilet directly on the other side of this old door, so I couldn’t re-open the door.
The rest of the wall and old siding was in great shape.
I had intended to cover it all in beadboard. But some sanding, three coats of primer, and two coats of exterior paint worked great.
Final product, non-window side:
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umbrellas are so expensive I thought I would just make like an awning out of outdoor fabric and scrap wood but then I was riding around and found an expensive one with a crank on the curb. the struts wore through the fabric so they threw it out, and while it was there it got covered in mud. after hosing down and laundering, I covered the holes with inner tube rubber.
there was a big post unattached to anything just randomly next to my deck but in the hot part of the day the shadow went off the deck so I had to borrow a posthole digger and move it over. today was the first sunny day I had off to really test it. it’s great.
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Just in case:
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Very cool, but won’t having a hand like that lead straight to an undersea volcanic base, scores of henchmen, and some sort of laser based weaponry pointed toward the world’s top financial markets?
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The possibility of becoming an evil supervillain after a table saw-related finger loss is low, but never zero
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Looks small, but this is 250 bricks. I have a pile of a few thousand bricks from old chimneys in the house being removed. They generally have mortar all over them. I spent the afternoon using a hammer to clean 250 of them in preparation for making a 200 foot long garden border. For all the work, they’re such small piles.
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I was doing exactly this (for a couple of weeks) that made me quit construction work for good in the '90s.
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Recently got my ham radio license with a friend, so we decided to build an SDR based tranceiveir (10-160m, in our hopes).
This is just the clock generator for the super-het part of the receiver (three leftmost connectors), and the direct digital synthesis based transmitter part (rightmost connector).
First time I design a 4 layer board.
Modulation (SSB, AM, digital modes) is completely digital. Heavy audio oversampling (~50×) tames spurs.
Tested with an instrument (not mine!) costing three times my car, works and behaves exactly as math and experience expected.
Could have been smaller, but I wanted it easy to hand solder, as my friend doesn’t do much SMT.
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Among the many things I inherited from my late friend was this antique meat cleaver.
It’s in good shape. There is one missing rivet and the handle is pretty grimy. Looks like a bit of rust or pitting near the end of the blade.
What do y’all think? Should I try to replace the rivet and clean the grip? Maybe sand it lightly? Remove the rust? Do such blades require seasoning? The stamp says it’s made of forged steel.
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You can get two-part fake rivets. That would be an easy fix.
And did you say seasoning?
This channel does great restorations.
Fake rivets at about the 10-minute mark.
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hook, line, and sinker 
I’m pretty sure this tool dates from before the 1940s. I’d like to both restore it (if that’s even necessary) and use it in the kitchen.
Thanks, I’ll dig into that
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Several years ago I used braodcast several of the marine bands over the internet to some local boating forums. We live on a huge lake that shares an international border so the Coast Guard and recreational traffic was fun and interesting to listen to especially during big party weekends and search and rescues. Search and rescue more times than not ended poorly.
I started getting some serious interference on a couple channels that would cause the scanner to hang on that channel. One day I heard the ham operators call sign so I was able to find him. Turns it it was that huge antenna I could see from my house. His antenna was bigger than my antenna.
I went over to talk to him, of course he was all legal and doing nothing wrong but he did help me and teach me how to filter out the interference and how to better ground my sytem to get rid of some annoying hum in the recordings.
In other word, ham operators are cool.
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Yes, definitely. It’ll look so much nicer in the event of having to (somewhat clumsily) knight somebody.
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My wife’s 60th birthday is coming up, she posted pictures of this on Facebook saying how cool. She’s never been subtle with her hints.
I googled it, how expensive. They’re 200 bucks.
I’m going to make one. Mine will be 3 plexiglass sides, no fill opening from the inside because cats, and I’m going to extend the sides a couple inches outside past the window to better seal it from the elements and keep bird droppings out of the window track and easier to clean. With all the bird flu she cleans our feeders at least once a month.
I could make a curved/round one but by the time I make the round top or sides and buy the necessary jig for my router to make the groove for the plexiglass I’m getting close to the 200 bucks. I think I’ll make it rectangle and concentrate on sealing it up better.
I’m also thinking PVC boards instead of wood but that starts to get pricey.
Any thoughts or suggestions, I’m all ears.
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Finally got around to staining, finishing and installing the doors for the bathroom vanity. Project done!
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Where does the vacuum tube go?
Seriously, though, that’s cool. My crumbling garage once housed a previous owner’s huge ham radio obsession. The garage doors still have the outline of his old call sign, and there are scraps of old electronics in the dirt. Kinda cool.
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