Wooden Pallet Mallet

I typically don't do much woodwork over the winter as the weather has a tendency to suck the enjoyment out of things.

When I set-up to start again in the spring, I usually find that I need a simple project to warm up and refresh my techniques before I get involved with something more complex.

Normally it's a bit of a throwaway project that I wouldn't put online, but this one was very simple to create and has been very useful, so I thought that it might be of use to others.

This year I made a wooden mallet as I needed one for leatherwork.

The handle was two strips of pallet wood glued up and shaped around a hammer handle.



The head of the mallet is one of the end blocks, also from a pallet.

The finished mallet. Simple, but effective

The technique is simple - drill through the centre of the block to create an opening that the top of the handle can fit through, but is narrow enough to make a tight fit.

Then drill through the part of the handle that protrudes from the top of the block and wedge a dowel in place to prevent the block from slipping. (The block is actually a tight enough fit that this is a little bit unnecessary, but it adds an extra layer of safety, and a bit more of an aesthetic quality to things).

Everything after that is just a matter of sanding and shaping.

Woodturned Pen

This isn't a project as such but last weekend I attended Makers Central in Birmingham.

It was a brilliant event, and great to be amongst so many creative people and share the wealth of knowledge and experience.

This pen is the result of my first attempt at wood turning courtesy of the Record Power stand.

It's certainly not perfect, but as a first attempt I'm pretty pleased with it, and a lathe is certainly on the workshop wishlist.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on May 8, 2018 at 10:38am PDT

Wedding Cake Stand

Off the back of the "Dutch Courage" sign that I made for the wedding, I was asked if I could also help with a custom cake stand for their wedding cake.


They're not having a traditional wedding cake, instead they've opted for brownies, in 7 different flavours, so the cake stand needs to accommodate them all and at the same time be able to differentiate between them.


In addition, there's a multi-colour theme to the wedding, so that needs to be included with the design.

The obvious thing to do was use different colours to separate the flavours, and my initial ideas centred around something like a painter's palette.



I was looking at a segmented circular design, but it was looking a bit strange with an odd number of segments, so I opted for six segments with a smaller platform in the middle to provide for the 7th segment.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Apr 9, 2018 at 4:25am PDT

To calculate the size I was told that there will be one tray of brownies per flavour, and that would be about equivalent in size to about a Roses tin, which is roughly 9 inches diameter by 4 inches tall.
Using that as I guide, I based the design on a circle of 18 inches diameter divided into 6 sectors (so 6 triangles with two 9" sides and a 6-and-a-bit" rounded side).
This equates to approximately equivalent size.


Construction

The back segment (red in the original diagram).
This one also has a small solid tip added
as it will overlap the central segment

• The base was cut from some chipboard up-cycled from some flat pack furniture.
• Each segment was cut from 3/8" marine plywood.
• Six 9x4" rectangles were cut to create the face panels, and attached to the sides of the raised segments (2 for the rear segment, 1 each for the other raised segments.)
• Supporting posts for each of the raised segments 
• The central "tip" of each segment was trimmed to allow room for the wooden pole that will support the centre segment.

These were secured to the base of the stand, but could be easily disassembled.



Rounded supports were attached to the underside of the curved edge of the segments. These were made from scrap, and supported a thin hardboard which was curved around to provide a solid outside to the segments. This was attached with staples, as the hardboard was too soft and nails passed straight through.

Each segment was wrapped with coloured fabric, fastened in place with staples and spray adhesive.

The centre segment was a smaller disc with a segment removed to allow the red segment to overlap. The supporting pole was approx 1.5" diameter and attached to the centre segment with a combination of glue and nails.
This assembly was wrapped in white fabric and attached to the base with a couple of screws (so to avoid rotation).

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Apr 15, 2018 at 2:12am PDT

I'm really pleased with how this project turned out. With a lot of projects, the actual building usually highlights issues not thought of during the design, and so adaptations have to be made, but in this case, the end result came out pretty much exactly as the initial design.

Working on this project also helped develop a new workflow - due to geographical and timing constraints, most of the design discussion was co-ordinated via WhatsApp. It was a case of being sent links and screenshots of ideas, sketching up a plan, photographing it and returning it etc. It was a surprisingly good system and something I'd definitely use again.

Nutsack

If you arrived here after a Google search for the title, you may be disappointed... maybe.

Recently I had a health checkup. Usual stuff - eat better, exercise more, yada, yada, yada.

One suggestion that came out of it would be... well... it's probably just easier to show you.. Ladies & Gentlemen, I present you... my nutsack!

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Apr 1, 2018 at 1:37am PDT

See what I did there? Took some sensible healthy eating advice and turned it into a really immature innuendo. You're welcome, world.

The sack is constructed from a 'lemon' shape of approximately 7 inches by 6 inches. The measurements were not that precise as I judged it based on simply wrapping the leather around the plastic tub it was replacing to get a roughly equal volume.





The holes for the drawstring are spaced evenly around the edge (20 in total, 10 each side).The measurements can be quite forgiving - it's more important to keep the holes the same distance from the edge, than it is to keep them equidistant from each other.

The drawstring its some leather lace I had left over from the leather notebook project I did a while back. Other guides I've seen suggest using two drawstrings originating from alternate sides of the 'lemon', but given the thickness of the lace I was using compared to the overall size of the bag, to do so in my case seemed a bit over the top.

Simply thread the lace from one end, through each hole, until it arrives back at the start, then pull the lace together to draw the bag closed.

The lettering on the outside was hand embossed, using a pyrography tool (which is essentially a lower temperature soldering iron). Be warned that leather is rather temperature sensitive, there's a thin line between embossing and burning.
That's why on the finished bag one of the lemon 'tab' bits is missing - I speak from experience.


Anyway, there you have it. A quick, simple project that can go from initial idea to complete in only a couple of hours while sat in front of the TV, yet provides endless opportunity for puerile comments.
Happy April Fools day!

Wedding Sign

I was asked to create a sign for a wedding. They're planning on having Karaoke and wanted a sign pointing to the bar for "Dutch courage".

Design


After exchanging a few ideas and a couple of preliminary sketches, we arrived at this design. Most of the graphics came from clipart, and the typeface is "URW Chancery L" in 132pt.


The overall size is  approximately a the size of an A3 piece of paper. As I don't have an A3 printer, I split the design across a few A4 sheets for printing.

Then came several hours of carving out the letters and patterns with a scalpel to create the stencil for later spray painting.









Building the sign
The sign is created from joining 3 lengths of up-cycled pallet wood. As with the Treasure Chest, the jointing was done manually with a combination of hand planing and simply finding lengths of wood that lined up well together.

The supports at the back of the sign for the stand

The wood is glued together, and also there are cross beams on the back - one at the top and one at the bottom.

These also form the mount for the stand.








The wood for the stand same from an old garden parasol that I upcycled. As it's previous life was as an object that hinged at various points and was designed to be folded, it was ideally sized - all I needed was to cut down the lengths. The pivot is nothing fancy, just a single screw.



The entire sign was sanded, and stained with a teak wood stain. An early attempt at stencilling the sign didn't go well, so the front ended up being sanded and stained a second time.
This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as after the second coat the woodgrain was much more pronounced and looked much better for it.

The arrow
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but it crossed my mind that although the venue and location has already been set for the wedding, Murphy's Law suggests that when the wedding rolls round, things will have changed and the arrow will end up pointing the wrong way, so I came up with the idea of making it a magnetic stick-on arrow so it could be swapped around.

The rear of the arrow with metal strip

Magnets embedded into the surface of the sign for mounting the arrow

I cut the arrow on the bandsaw, and painted it white, then a cut a section of flat steel and epoxyed it to the back of the arrow.
Then in the place on the sign where the arrow was to be mounted, I used a forstner drill to drill 3 inlays. In each of these holes I epoxyed a circular magnet so that it sat flush with the face of the sign.


Painting
I taped the stencil to the face of the sign, and applied two coats of enamel white spray paint. Unfortunately the delicate patterns on the edge of the stencil didn't work too well with the spray, so once a couple of sprays were down to mark out the position of the design, I removed the stencil and started painting by hand. To do this I sprayed some of the paint into the cap, and used a thin brush.

The end result

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Mar 7, 2018 at 4:40am PST

PC case notification screen, part 3 - software & installation

In the first two parts of this project, I setup a Raspberry Pi to display notifications from my desktop PCs to a small LCD which I then 3D printed mounts for to install it into the PC itself.

Software
I originally hoped to use existing software, such as Grafana and Graphite, but although they do run on the Raspberry Pi, it was difficult to get them to behave reliably, so I ended up going for a homebrew solution.

As I alluded to in an earlier post, the data comes out of the desktop by piping output from the linux command sensors via the a USB serial port like so:

sensors > /dev/ttyUSB0 2>/dev/null

The application running on the Pi reads data from the serial port, and using a simple parser, extracts the system temperature.

This is then passed to a Processing.org sketch, which draws an (admittedly rather basic) gauge, displaying the temperature.

The code is available on Github. It also contains an interface class and an example implementation of that class, this is a wrapper I made around the Processing.org library to make it easier to compartmentalise the processing functionality into separate classes, with the intent of making it easier to create a modular display (so further notification modules could be added in future - system speed, email/social media notifications etc).

Installation

The two mounts are either side of the metal front panel of the case, back-to-back.
The Pi sits on the inside, and the display sits on the outside (of the metal chassis - it is covered by the actual front panel of the case).
This allows the outside of the case to remain unchanged, but the display of the LCD is bright enough to shine through the translucent panel.

When the PC is powered down, the USB port still provides power, so the Pi stays on, but the power to the display is cut. This avoids having to go through the Pi boot sequence each time, but allows the display to be shut off.

A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Feb 25, 2018 at 4:54am PST

PC-case notification screen: Part 2, mounts and wiring

In the last post, I configured a Raspberry Pi to receive stats from my desktop PC and display them on a small LCD from a car reversing camera kit.

The next stage is to turn this into a much neater setup to integrate it into my desktop PCs case.

Mounting
The Raspberry Pi quite a popular format, so there's plenty of cases on Thingiverse to choose from - no need to reinvent the wheel. I went with this tray design, as it was the easiest to adapt.

The front of my PC case has several mounting points for an array of fans, so all that was necessary was to create a way of joining the Pi Tray to them.
A simple 'X' shaped bracket in OpenSCAD is all that was needed. It would be easy enough to join this to the model for the Pi Tray, but I ended up printing them separately and gluing them together.


I used the same design as the basis of the mount for the display.
Out of the box it has it's own small stand to attach to a dashboard, with a screw pivot for tilting the display. My idea was to simply remove the stand part and use the same mounting point.

The Pi attached to it's completed mount

The mount for the screen. As you can see, it makes use of the existing stand mounts

Wiring

Note: The 12V line is typically the yellow line,
it just so happens on the connector I found was non-standard.

The LCD runs of 12 volts. This is nice and easy to deal with - Molex connector straight to the power supply. This was just a case of joining the connector for the display to the Molex.


The Pi requires 5 volts, and there's 2 options on how to provide this - Also on the Molex, or via USB. There's pros and cons to both methods.

• Going the Molex route is more straightforward - it can use the same connector as the LCD, so wiring will be neater, but on the downside, when the desktop is powered off, the power to the Pi will be cut. This runs the risk of corruption of the SD card.
• Going the USB route means more wiring and a separate power lead, but has the advantage that my desktops motherboard still powers USB devices when powered down, therefore the Pi can remain on.

I opted to go for the USB option. There's spare USB headers on the motherboard, so I needed to make an adapter to use those.


Starting with a short USB extension cable, I removed the socket and split out the wires.


Then using a header lead pulled from an old PCs front panel, remove the header connector. Then it's just a case of matching up the pins and joining them together.

The adapter without the 3D printed cover (top),
and the finished adapter (bottom).
Each motherboard adapter can support 2 ports, so I left the remaining wires outside (just heat-shrinked for safety), so they're available if I decide to add another internal port later.

The Pi is connected to this using a console cable. This is a USB cable with 4 output pins - 5V, ground, TX and RX, and connects directly to the GPIO of the Pi.

It's not recommended to use the 5V GPIO pin for power as it lacks some of the control circuitry that the usual power socket has, but has the power is coming from a regulated USB socket, it should be fine in this case.

The console cable also takes care of the level conversion of the 5v levels to Pi-safe 3.3v, and appears to the PC as a USB-serial adapter.

Finally, all that's left is to connect the display to the Raspberry Pi. Both the display and the Pi have Composite sockets, so I removed the socket from the display and replaced it with a plug.

SCAD code for the mount
As this is really quite a niche thing I'm not going to put the files on Thingiverse, but here's the OpenSCAD code in case it's useful to anyone.

// Just comment out the one you don't want
piMount();
screenMount();

// Couldn't be bothered to do the conversion...
function inches(x=1) = x*25.4;

module piMount() {
  difference() {
    cube([inches(4.5),inches(2.75),inches(0.125)], center=true);
    translate([inches(-2.0625),inches(-1.125),0]) { screwholes();}    
    translate([55,0,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(0.8),inches(0.8), center=true);}    
    translate([-55,0,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(0.8),inches(0.8), center=true);}
    translate([0,40,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(1),inches(1), center=true);}
    translate([0,-40,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(1),inches(1), center=true);}
  }
}

module screenMount() {
  difference() {
    cube([inches(4.5),inches(2.75),inches(0.5)], center=true);
    translate([inches(-2.0625),inches(-1.125),0]) { screwholes();}    
    
    cube([1.125*25.4,12.7,50], center=true);
    rotate([0,90,0]) {cylinder(5*25.4,0.125*25.4,0.125*25.4,true);}

    translate([55,0,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(0.8),inches(0.8), center=true);}    
    translate([-55,0,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(0.8),inches(0.8), center=true);}
    translate([0,40,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(1),inches(1), center=true);}
    translate([0,-40,0]) {cylinder(inches(0.75),inches(1),inches(1), center=true);}
  }
}

module screwholes() {
  cylinder(inches(5),inches(0.125),inches(0.125),true);
  translate([inches(4.125),0,0]) {cylinder(inches(5),inches(0.125),inches(0.125),true);}
  translate([0,inches(2.25),0]) {cylinder(inches(5),inches(0.125),inches(0.125),true);}
  translate([inches(4.125),inches(2.25),0]) {cylinder(inches(5),inches(0.125),inches(0.125),true);}
}

The basic wrapper around the USB connector

difference() {
    cube([15,40,9], true);
    translate([0,7,0]) {cube([13,27,7], true);}
    cube([9,45,7], true);
    translate([0,0,5]) {cube([20,50,10], true);}
}