Archive for March, 2010

Tom Dunne of newstalk 106-108 FN in Ireland called me at 4:30 in the morning one friday to talk about treehouses. You can listen to the recording: Go to http://media.newstalk.ie/listenback/, then Tom Dunne, Archive, March 26 2010. Part 3, 48 minutes in. (Thanks Tom and Mia for finding it!).

I’ve been working on creating a railing for the upstairs portion of my house. I wanted to create it out of steel and have some cool curves in it. I needed a bending jig, and after experimenting with wood I realized it wouldn’t withstand the forces I was exerting on it for the curves I wanted. So, I made one out of steel.

The jig is just clamped to my table.

It consists of some 3/16″ steel (I think) hand bent to the curve I wanted. The circular tube piece is to act as a strong resistance to the bend. I smoothed it out the outer edge with a file, and added another curl on top (welded in the center) to get the curve started:

Once the curve is started it can be dropped into the lower curve area and the curve finished:

Resulting curves:

Hopefully google will index this and help other people who are trying to figure out how to do some bends.

Some sites that inspired me:

http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=7802

Bending Jig on Google books.

Scroll work ideas

Hand done curves — great for art, but bad for consistent curves.

It’s always geeky and interesting to see web stats for a site. Mine gets ~80 to ~100 visits on a normal day. The asylum.com article spiked that up to 30,000 visits in one day.

From analytics.google.com for my domain:

Rolling In

Not a pretty beast, and not easy to ride. It took me thee weeks of practice before I could ride it, and only after that could I “sort of” ride it. No free mounting or anything crazy like that. The balance point is just crazy difficult compared to a regular unicycle.

Here’s a video of me riding it on 1/31/2010:

I still plan to “shine it up” and build a small backrest. I originally wanted a nice large backrest, but I decided that it would hinder the ride ability of it.

Here’s the building process, which went together really fast (it is a hack):

Cut up a bike and figure out roughly where I wanted things:

All trial and error, with some guessing:

Weld a seat together out of some old bike tubes:

Weld it all together and cover the seat:

Hmm…not too elegant of “steps”.

Blogger Brian Fairbanks, of asylum.com did an interview of my prior living in a treehouse. He came up with a cool article. Check it out: How to Live in a Treehouse, From a Guy Who Did It for Five Years

:)

Louise got me a powder coating gun for Christmas, and my friend Eric gave me his old stove so I could do some homebrew powder coating. I finally got it all together and did my KH24 frame.

First, I used some stripper to get my frame nice and clean. Originally I used some orange “natural” stripper, but it didn’t work at all, and I ended up having to buy the caustic nasty stuff to get the job done. It took 3 or 4 coats before all the paint was off, which was essential in getting a good finish:

I sprayed it first with red, baked it for 20 mins, and it was done! I masked the side with some tape and sprayed again with black to leave a red stripe:

The tape didn’t work all too well, and left some rough edges and overspray marks…but heck, it was my first try, and I’m quite happy with the results.