Category: Projects

Operation: Undertaker

Were back, and as stated in the previous post, it’s Project March.  Similar to Project Gypsy Hauler, this post focuses on a physics problem.  Actually, I shorted that word a tad – make that a physic-al problem.  Do you recall a rant a few posts back regarding some issues trying to acquire a file cabinet (link here).  At that end of that (maybe in the comments) it was revealed that the problem had been solved thanks to a Mega store.  That was really a premature closure of the ordeal.  Sure, the new file cabinet had been ordered, but it had not arrived yet.  I was really in a holding pattern waiting for it to be shipped.  Normally this wait would be one filled with eager anticipation – truth is it was 6 weeks of concern, fretting, worry, hair pulling, aspirin popping and pencil sharpening.  This was all due to roughly 200 yards.  This represents the distance from the curb to my walk in basement (yes, that includes the same stretch the drywall had to travel in the hauler).  Why is this an issue you ask .. you did ask that right — sure you did.  What a great question!  With the new source of the file cabinet, came a new shipping policy.  They only provided curb service – no option to pay an extra $100 and at least get it to the driveway like that other customer hating company had.  Now, I don’t consider myself a slouch under the weight bar, but even before I shed a lot of muscle when retooling my body for the distance running circuit, ~450lbs was a tad out of reach.  Every scenario that was played out ended with spending the Spring mowing around a  450 pound crate sitting by the curb.

By the time the shipping notice hit my inbox the pencil was a tiny nub.  It was past due to make this happen and paper wasn’t going to solve this problem.  Build phase was at hand and that means a trip to the basement… but first a quick trip to Menards.  The final plan called for utilizing my truck to cover the distance from the curb to the basement along with a huge assumption the shipping truck driver would be willing to help me out with the transfer phase of the plan.  I figured the day it arrived it was going to be me, one (or maybe two) shippers and the crate.   It was also likely going to be me who has to get the crate out of the truck but would seek help getting it wrestled into the basement.  With those parameters in place it was pretty easy to see the heart of the issue was figuring out how to easily get the cabinet into the truck and out of the truck – simple eh?  you just build one of these:

If you haven’t figured it out yet, there are a lot of 2×4’s laying around my basement at the moment because of another project that is underway.  That other project requires a lot of table saw work ripping these boards by myself – just me and my trusty roller stands (cue light bulb).  Surely there was some way to incorporate that capability into the design.  All that is needed is a bunch of cased bearings which was the reason for the Menard’s run… and a wasted Home Depot stop.  Finally losing an internal argument whether to ask for help or not, I located an employee who translated my obscure explanation of what I needed and took me directly to the end of the table saw aisle.  He quickly pointed to a tiny bin containing the exact items I wanted.  Every one of them hit the cart but had a feeling there wasn’t enough to do the job.  To resolve this another stop was made at Home Depot.  Yes, the internal battle won again, but this time I was met with – uh, what is that?  No blaming me this time, the request came with a visual having brought one of them in with me.  Denied!  The Menard’s purchase would have to work.

Hit the jump to see how this all comes together and whether it was worth all the trouble!

Continue reading Operation: Undertaker

Operation: Gypsy Hauler

Welcome to Project Week – crowd, standing in unbridled anxiety cheer with joy in their hearts… oh wait, they were apparently gathered to celebrate the selection of the new Pope.  Well, if they were here for my post they would be cheering just as much (or perhaps not).  It doesn’t really matter you are stuck listening to my ramblings on the latest episodes of  Brian the Handyman.  This also buys me some time while I get to work on another batch of real pictures and reset the bar on the reader expectations.  Apparently a few of the previous posts were considered pretty good and I just can’t have that pressure on me.

The first project topic of the month is for you physics fans out there.. or mechanical engineers or carpenters or for that matter weightlifters.  Let’s start with a problem.  What’s the best way for two individuals to move 50 sheets of 1/2 inch 4×12 plaster base drywall from a garage to the walk in basement across a sloping grass path?  Tick Tock Tick Tock Tick Tock

wait, let’s make this a visual daily double.  Does this shot convey the enormity of the situation?

Maybe some additional context.  A high school kid and I pulled these sheets off of a lift truck and hauled them into the garage – just the two of us – cocky high school kid and slightly fit 45 year old.  This was one of those events that you resign to knowing you will be hurting after it’s done but you have no other choice but to get it over with – kind of like when I had my second degree black belt test and had to do my sparring time with the higher degrees.  The latter left me with a severely damaged shoulder socket that had to be surgically repaired – the drywall unloading just left me with a locked up back.    But I digress from the original question … what’s is your idea for the best approach to get these to the worksite?

Did you say .. “Duh, take some of your 2×4 stash and build yourself a hauler cart”   If so, damn you are good.  If not, then please accept our parting prizes.  Needless to say, I went the Tool Man way and got to work building myself a cart.  One thing that could not be overlooked is just how heavy those drywall sheets are.   They were still tapped in pairs making them a force to be reckoned with.  Yes, I could have separated them, but that would take the fun out of it and doubled the trips – double doo doo.  First thing was to build a strong base.  Taking a page out of the shelves I built for the basement, I went with the stacked 2×4 approach.  I also added the same cross supports which made it a spitting image of one of  the shelf layers.  The intent was to design it to fit through one half of our double doors which was the constraint for how wide the carrier could be.  Knowing that the weight was going to be factor, it was decided that the carrier should be evenly distributed over the base width.  Noodling on it a bit came up with two options.  One approach would be to slant the drywall across the entire width.  Imagine a set of 2×4 straight up on one side and other 2×4’s connecting at the bottom of the base and then attached to the tops of the other 2x4s.  Actually don’t waste your time imagining that because I decided to nix that idea.  Instead I went with a two sided approach requiring an upside down V down the middle of the platform.  Since I made that.. I can actually show you how that looks.

Hit the jump to find out how this all worked out!

Continue reading Operation: Gypsy Hauler

An “Epic” Haunted Trail 2012

There are times when you look back and simply surprise yourself.  Sunday happened to be one of those moments for me.  In late September Linda and I had a long discussion about whether we could actually pull off the Annual Halloween Party this year.  Project Auuunnnoold had the basement in full hurricane mode, Linda’s trip to Iowa was coming up, I had an event to train for and way too many odds and ends to get done before even considering having people over.  It’s hard to give up a tradition and eventually we decided to give a try but pushed the date out later than usual to provide a few more work hours to address the reams of to-do lists.  Linda’s key requirement – there had to be a working bathroom in the basement.  Two weeks before show-time Auuunnnoold was wreaking havoc on me.  Walls needed to be anchored, wire needed to be ran, drywall had to be hung, tile laid, grout ground in, plumbing finished and doors installed.  I cannot tell you how thankful I am to have such good friends and family.  With the saving assistance of Jeff, Rocket, Pez, Pakage and Vonno we managed to pull it all off.  Drywall and wiring went in the week before, tile went down on Monday, grout on Tuesday, grout sealed on Wednesday, plumbing finished and a Thursday and I was literally installing the doors Friday morning.  In the midst of all this I was cleaning up like a madman and dealing with the high decorations – Linda was busy decorating the rest of the house and planning out the food and drinks.  After a huge event Friday night I was back cleaning up the mess from the doors only to wake up early the next morning to prep the outside for the party and attack the new tradition of “The Haunted Trail”.  Oh, on Tuesday I had to dispose of a body… but more on that in an upcoming post.

So, I picked this picture as the lead image because it represented how I felt leading up to the party… and it was the lead decoration on the 2012 Haunted Trail – Yep, we got it all done but huge credit has to go to RenderBoy who came to our rescue and did a stellar job.

The alert viewers out there might have noticed an intriguing orange cord in the image above.  That’s right folks, this year we stepped it up and brought the element of power to the trail.  Thanks to a truckload of extension cords, RenderBoy was able to get power all the way down to Serenity (link here).  If you are familiar with the property you are likely amazed at this point!  Now we had a whole new avenue for decorations and RenderBoy used it to the fullest.  As a special treat, I’ll take you through some of the trail.  Before that, I need to mention my favorite photography quote “One bad picture is a mistake, a hundred bad pictures is a style.”  61 blurry pictures pretty much puts me in the style category so in celebration of Halloween I give you the Blair Witch style of the Haunted Trail (translated.. crappy cell phone photos – it definitely deserved better).  Also note this is just a subset of the shots – you can see all the pictures up on Eddiesoft’s Photo Gallery (link here).

Hit the jump to see a sampling of the trail!

Continue reading An “Epic” Haunted Trail 2012

Introducing the Geek Cave

I think I’ve finally reached a man cave pinnacle and figured I would share my dark side of geekdom.  In the early stages of planning our current home there was serious consideration and design time spent on our bonus room with the full intent to transform it into a theater room.  As a result, a lot of the power, audio wiring, cat6 and component mounts were all put in place as the walls were being constructed.  Once the house was completed, the next steps just involved hooking everything up the way I wanted it.  There has been a few iterations of the configuration as technology was upgraded and new offerings came out for gaming, but this is the current XBox360 layout.  Somewhat embarrassing, it should really be classified more as a Geek Cave (cut me some slack on the image, it took me all of about 2 minutes to crank it out in PaintShop Pro.

If you are having difficulty figuring it out (and I highly doubt that), my game of choice is Rock Band along with the new Rocksmith offering my friends gave me for Christmas.  Since the day I went over to Pakage’s to check out Guitar Hero I’ve been addicted to that type of music themed game and although originally focused on the guitar peripherals, I’ve since become enamored with the drums (for the record I’m running in the top 2% on the Xbox leaderboards for Pro Drums).  A downside to that migration is the atrophying of the plastic guitar skills – Pakage is pretty much our foundation on the guitar and Billy now anchors the vocals which are not depicted since he brings over his professional mic and modified receiver for that functionality.

Assuming a colorform-esq picture isn’t going to satisfy your graphic needs, hit the jump and I’ll take you through all the elements (complete with photos!)

Continue reading Introducing the Geek Cave

Project: Tri-Fecta-Pod

So as a precursor to the Yellowstone photo posts, the topic today actually originates from a couple of lessons learned while we were out there.  Linda and I currently shoot with three Nikon bodies, a D70, D90 and a D7000.  This allows us to each have our own bodies with our preferred as keep one additional lens on the third body for convenient switching without having to swap glass in the field.  Well, let’s refine that last statement to “reduce” the amount of times we have to swap glass because we still find ourselves playing musical lenses to take advantages of specific body features.  Now, both our big lenses are configured with collar tripod mounts and we generally keep an Arca Swiss quick release plate on those while out with our carbon fiber travel tripod.  Bodies with the wide glass need the tripod mount directly on the body.  When I purchased our Benro head for the tripod and the same Benro head for the travel tripod I also added an additional release plate giving us a total of three.  You would think this would be enough, but we soon found out in Yellowstone that this is insufficient if you are changing glass across all three bodies.  Inevitably Linda would end up trying to take a wide angle shot on a camera without a mount.  After a few choice words the camera with the mount was located, the plate removed and then added to the desired camera.  This became extremely frustrating and depending on the situation could cause you to completely lose the shot.

The second lesson learned was there are situations where both of us would like to use the tripod at the same time or there were conditions that favor one tripod over another.  Generally we only take one tripod with us, the lighter travel tripod since I’m the one who usually gets to carry it.  Our other one is a SLIK built to withstand a small hurricane.

Now the weight isn’t a big issue since we would just throw the heavy one in the car and only bring it out when we needed it.  The underlying annoyance is they use a different quick release plate system.

Here is a shot of the plates from the top – the part that attaches to the camera:

and now from the side that attaches to the tripod which is the heart of the problem:

We would be spending more time trying to mix and match the plates than capturing the shot.  On the drive back a decision was made to try and solve both of these problems.

First task was to purchase three more Arca Swiss plates.  One was a little longer than the others to provide a better hold for the Beast since the smaller plates only provided for one screw allowing it to shift on the plate if we were not careful.  Problem one SOLVED.

Hit the jump to see how problem two was resolved.

Continue reading Project: Tri-Fecta-Pod

Decorations on the Cheap, Halloween Party Pt 2

Still in the midst of my whirlwind ride to the quota, I give you the next post in the 2011 Halloween Party series.  This post (and the next in the series to kill the suspense) pertains to my quest to improve what I affectionately call the Haunted Trail.  It started last year when a number of people wanted to see the nearly finished state of Serenity (link here).  After talking about all the work it took to design and, a lot of my party guests were hoping to walk down to it.  At the time this posed a slight problem since there was no power that far away from the house and even though there was a maintained trail to it, navigating in the dark was even difficult for myself (I am still apologizing for the group of people I managed to get lost in a ravine that year).  Long story short, I purchased some solar lights to help navigate the path and decided to put up one of the new PVC ghouls and a sound activated witch to entertain the hikers.  That turned out pretty well, so one thing led to another and plans were put in motion to improve it for this year.

The first task was to find ways to decorate the path without the use of power.  The path is fairly long as well so decorations needed to be cost efficient.  For about a week a number of brainstorming sessions were held generating a number of ideas… some good… some awful and some too ambitious – I should probably mention that there was another requirement in the mix – it had to be something I could do within a week.  It is quite obvious that somewhere in my past life I wronged Father Time.  Against all odds there was one good idea that appeared to fit the bill.  All that was left was to find the materials at a reasonable price.  With fingers crossed, Linda and I went to a local Dollar Store to see if there was anything there that could be used for the new decoration.  While scouting around the store, we stumbled on some mini foam pumpkins a little smaller than a Nerf football.  Carving is in my blood, they appear to be hollow and they are only ONE DOLLAR a piece.  Linda must have seen the wheels turning and rolled her eyes while 10 of these babies quickly made their way into the cart.  I’ll save the details for the original decoration idea for later.

Once home, it was time to see if these pumpkins were actually carve-able.  If not, there was still value as a simple hanging decoration that could be placed randomly around the path.  There wasn’t time to mess around with the formal pattern making so went old school on it.  A few derivatives of triangles for the eyes, another altered one for the nose and a classic tooth mouth was all investment needed for the first trial.  A quick trip down to the basement for a an experiment with the Dremel brought a huge grin to my face.  Sure enough, the pumpkin was indeed hollow.  It was definitely cheaper than the ones used for the official pumpkin collection in that they were thicker skinned and had porous foam.  It also had a white interior where the more expensive ones were tinted orange.  Carving wasn’t as smooth as the cutter had to go a lot deeper to make it through and the foam gaps kept pulling the blade off of the intended path.  The first pumpkin ended up taking about 30 minutes trying to get comfortable with the speed required by the Dremel and the amount of force needed to push it around the pattern.  The good news is this was doable and if I got through 3-5 a night it would be done in plenty of time.  Here is how one of them came out:

Hit the jump to read more about this fun and inexpensive decoration

Continue reading Decorations on the Cheap, Halloween Party Pt 2

Confront Thy Fears – Halloween Party Pt 1

I see my absence from posting hasn’t shocked anyone into calling out a search party.  Alas, all is well, but life is a little hectic at the moment.  We had Teacup Agility Nationals this month, new international assignments at work and of course in the midst of all this is our annual Halloween Party.  If you recall from a previous post (link here), Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and both Linda and I enjoy decorating up the place and having some of our friends over for a few libations while enjoying a bonfire.  This year we expanded our haunted trail, but more on that in the future for today is all about orange colored foam and implements of destruction.

So first off, a quick quiz.

  • What is my favorite Halloween activity?
  • What is my most feared and despised occupation … hint, some would call it a phobia?

Queue annoying Jeopardy music.   Please put your pens down, it is time to reveal the answer.

Did you answer correctly? I will also accept decorating and scaring neighbor kids for the first answer, but ANY answer other than #$@#$%^&$ clowns is completely unacceptable. So it was time again to add another pumpkin to the collection. This one officially brings the collection to 18. As with the last 5 or 6, I wanted to make my own pattern. Half the fun is trolling Google Images trying to find the perfectly lit photo or image to transform into a scary nightlight. This year turned out to be a little frustrating. After trying all my favorite keyword searches like ghoul, demon, vampire etc. I kept coming up empty on good specimens to transform. This step takes a tremendous amount of time and I didn’t have time to waste on an image that wasn’t going to produce a nice silhouette for a pumpkin. There were one or two that might have worked, but I just wasn’t feeling it. Time to take a step back and go at it from a different angle. A self assessment was needed to figure out what would make this year’s carving memorable. An inner dialog  was initiated with one common question. What creeps me out? If there was something out there that scared me, made me uneasy and gave me the heebie jeebies, what would it be?  A certain president jumped to mind, but quickly dismissed it since American voters have wised up to socialism so what else was there? … and then a light bulb went off. There is really only one obvious answer. It was time to confront my phobia head on… take it by the big nose and beat it into submission. To say I was unprepared for what was ahead would be an understatement. A few key taps in the Google search field S C A R Y  C L O W N produced a collection of images so hideous, so vile and so demonic that I broke out in a sweat and nearly screamed. However, I was committed to this task and no mime loose in the department store lipstick aisle was going to deter me. Slowly I navigated through the thumbnails which were not surprising 85% pictures of Pennywise but there was not an image that had enough contrast required to produce a good stencil. Still sweating from staring at all those clowns, I was forced to switch to my secret backup. Here is a tip to keep between the LifeIntrigued family shhhhh tattoo stencils make great pumpkin stencils starting points shhhhhhh. Turns out our crafts have some similarities and one of the reasons I enjoy watching tattoo artists and their reality shows. A quick jump to TattooDonkey.com and within seconds I had the base image. Disclaimer. The image selected can be found by entering Scary Clown in the search field. I have no intention of providing anyone else the stencil above and all rights remain with the original creator. Now I have already blogged about how the transformation from image to stencil goes (link here), so I will not bore you with those details again.

Hit the jump to see some additional comments and pictures of the final product.

Continue reading Confront Thy Fears – Halloween Party Pt 1

Operation: Bridge to Vegas

Well, this has been an interesting weekend.  It started out pretty good with a lumber run to Lowe’s, a saw session followed up with a fun night of Rock Band with Billy and Pakage (the R!Vagiants reunion tour – with fans calling out where’s David all night).  Around 3 in morning things turned ugly.  That is when Pakage informed me our well had gone dry – major suckage.  We played a few more songs for the crowd and made our way off the stage.  After verifying the well pump breaker had tripped I set out to find a cause.  The master bath shower faucet had a few drips so I tried taking advantage of the water pressure loss to see if I could change out the springs.  An hour later I gave up lacking some needed tools and worried I’d snap the pipes at 4:30am – not good.  I hit the bed after putting the faucet back together to get some shuteye before the long day of hauling water.  6:30am I was back up, Linda helped me get the tank in the truck and 3.5 hours later I’d hauled 24oo gallons of water….. but that was just the beginning of the days work.. there was Vegas to build!

.. and that brings us to the topic of today’s post.  (Note, my brother has been giving me grief that I pre-write some of my posts ahead of time so felt obligated to write this the same day I completed the project).  Last year I built a foot bridge over a gully on the lot so the people at our Halloween party could go see Serenity (link here).  That bridge was working out great until the Spring flooding came.  One day it was there, the next it had taken a vacation down the stream.  Multiple searches up and down the stream have been fruitless which is odd since there are numerous places where trees had fallen across the stream.  You would think it would have been caught up in those branches.  With the Halloween party approaching once again, it was time to remedy this situation.  Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Serenity’s little brother VEGAS.

hit the jump to read all about the project.

Continue reading Operation: Bridge to Vegas

Thirteen.One on the 10 Year Anniversary of 9/11

Greetings everyone.  It seems out of place to make a post about a personal event on this day of remembrance.  Therefore, let’s take a moment to send our thoughts and prayers to the victims of that fateful day 10 years ago.  I refuse to give the perpetrators the satisfaction of their actions and instead of focusing on the fear and uncertainty of that day (as every local newspaper and program I’ve come across today) I remember it as a day America came together.  There were no petty squabbles between neighbors, no politicians slandering one another in hopes of getting an extra vote and absolutely no uncertainty regarding the love for the best country in the world.  We were bound by a common cause and mad as hell.  To those that experienced a tragic loss I express my deepest sympathy.  To the heroes of that day and those who took up the fight I forever owe my gratitude with special appreciation to Seal Team 6 who demonstrated the inevitable outcome when mess with the Red, White and Blue.

As alluded to, this day also marked a big event on a personal front.  After 3 years of hard work and countless setbacks I had an opportunity to put another check on my Life List.  Some of you may know and some of you may not, but I have had a goal to run a half marathon for some time now.  With the accomplishment of the 15K under the belt (link) the next evolution of the challenge was the daunting half.  It doesn’t seem like much considering it is a just under 4 more miles but that itty bitty distance became my nemesis.  It seemed like every time I set out to prepare, something happened that cut that opportunity short.  The latest battle was with my torn hamstring which cost me all last year.  Thanks to a heavy regiment of therapy my leg problems were mostly brought under control requiring continual training consideration, but finally strong enough to take the pounding.  It was also evident some other things had to change to get in front of the numerous other injuries.  I dropped 16 pounds (as of weigh in before the race) and retooled my body for the requirements of running (translated .. core, core core).  This year’s racing circuit was geared to preparing for the this day – The 4 mile Chase warmup, the 15K Steamboat and the Bix7 all went well so optimism was in the air.  Through all this was a steady diet of short and long runs (practically every other day including training runs on vacation) to get me prepared for the extra 4.  As the days started clicking off I hit my distance marks culminating in the final 12.6 mile training run last Sunday.  I can honestly say the way I felt after that run left me a little skeptical I could pull it off.

Hit the jump to read more about the event .. with pictures!

Continue reading Thirteen.One on the 10 Year Anniversary of 9/11

Operation: Pesky Varmint Control

It has been awhile since I’ve embarked on an operation around here.  Most of my time has been spent training for some upcoming runs and dealing with the daily upkeep around the lot.  Unfortunately,  the catalyst for this effort is based in some sadness.  We had to say goodbye to an old friend this month.  While scouting out our lot to set the placement for the house, we became attached a tall sturdy oak in the middle of the woods.  In fact, we liked it so much we actually positioned our house around it so we could enjoy it from our windows every day.  There was a lot of construction near it which might have caused it some undue trauma or possibly succumbed to some tree pests invading the area.  In either case, the tree didn’t make it through the Spring and we had to put it down.

Not only did we lose an excellent source of shade, but I also lost my bird theater since our feeders were hung off its branches.  I literally have thousands of bird pictures as a result of that tree and it was heart tugging to watch it be ravaged by the chainsaws.  Once down my immediate concern went to how to keep from losing all the birds that had adopted my feeders.  In desperation I rigged a temporary solution off of the deck railing.  This sounded like a plan until I came home and saw this one day.

That would be a mother raccoon hanging onto the bird feeder in order to drop seed down to her 3 (actually 4) babies. Unbelievable how intelligent these creatures are. From that point on, those babies came back all day long to feast on whatever the birds dropped into the grass or porch. Of course, this included a passion for digging holes in search of any seeds that may have slipped into a crack. This is unacceptable and since I will not harm a young animal or an adult with its young I was forced to initiate Operation Pesky Varmint Control…for simplicity, lets call it Operation PVC. This was going to take something that can withstand the elements, be easy to work with and be a hindrance to bandits with thumbs. A trip to Lowes was in order and I knew just the aisle to start in. After about 6 hours across multiple trips to Lowes I had gathered the following.

If you are curious how all these fit together, hit the jump to see the rest of the post.

Continue reading Operation: Pesky Varmint Control