A flower I designed and rendered. This one isn’t for machining, and was just for playing around with to create something as artwork for the computer. It looks great as a desktop background! Click on... [read more]

July 2022 update: I made this bowl in real life. Check out the result: Lotus Bowl CNC woodworking. This is an animation rendering of a concept bowl that I designed from scratch. I’m hoping to... [read more]

After wrapping the house the next step was to get it sealed for winter. Check out the previous post where I did that work: Wrapping the Workshop. The roofers came and put on the roof... [read more]

I took this photo from our deck using my drone[aff link]. The moon was much bigger in person, and I edited the image a bit in Lightroom. You can tell by looking at the sky... [read more]

We got about three inches of snow a few days ago, and the forecast is for up to 8′! Here is the sunrise from this morning off our deck in Truckee, California.

In the last post I wrote about how me and the crew got the building semi-roofed; the OSB sheathing covered most stuff and would keep out most rain. It did rain a bit and test... [read more]

In the last post I talked about how we go the steel posts and main beam installed for my garage/shop project. I was working really hard to get the roof on and keep everything dry,... [read more]

The outer shell of the structure went up pretty quickly, and it was soon time to get the main ridge beam installed and begin roof sheathing. My plans called for two steel posts supporting three... [read more]

Once the wood was delivered it was go time for construction. I needed to get it roofed before winter started rolling in, and the pre-framed walls gave me a pretty good head start, but this... [read more]

The slab was done and it was now time to get the wood package from Pacific Modern Homes Inc (PMHI) via my dealer California Precut Homes (CPH). Once my plans were approved by the county... [read more]

In the previous post I talked about excavation. Jump back there if you missed it, or check out all the posts for my Workshop Project 2021. Once the digging was done the guys from Bobby... [read more]

I hired Bobby Jones Concrete to do both my excavation and concrete foundation. Initially I had contacted them to just do the concrete, but they mentioned they also did digging. It was easier for me... [read more]

At this point I was waiting for my permit application to be reviewed, but I could start doing some general site preparation. The site had a huge pile of construction wood from when the house... [read more]

Check out my previous article where I discussed how I got plans for my workshop. I want to go back a bit and discuss the overall top level process for getting an owner-builder permit. When... [read more]

Previously, I discussed some of the initial workshop layout in part 1. The Truckee area gets a lot of snow which limits the construction season. This greatly affected my decision on how to get the... [read more]

We live near Lake Tahoe, California in a town called Truckee. When we bought the house it didn’t have a garage, and I was perfectly fine with that. I knew I wanted to have a... [read more]

I stumbled across a Blender tutorial where Diego Gangl created a faux watercolor texturing technique in Blender. It is amazing! I decided to take the effect and apply it to a generated tree using the... [read more]

Details matter, but they are getting lost. At Apple I worked on the main User Interface (UI) framework called AppKit for about 13 years. I would help enforce UI consistency in applications by logging bugs... [read more]

I’m playing around with tree generation using Blender with the Sapling plugin. I first traced the outline of a maple tree and used it as a leaf instance. The tree plugin has a ton of... [read more]

I’ve been working on learning Blender, a free open-source 3D program available for macOS, Windows and Linux. I have a lot of goals with learning it, but the main thing is just to have fun.... [read more]

I have been riding a geared unicycle since around 2006 or 2007. At that time Schlumpf Innovations partnered with Kris Holm Unicycles to develop a shiftable geared unicycle hub. Florian Schlumpf already had a regular... [read more]

I’ve been fascinated with timber framing since I learned about the concept about a year ago. We have a lot of trees on our property and I’m planning on building a greenhouse utilizing traditional timber... [read more]

This is a continuation of the last post introducing the project. This project isn’t done (it isn’t strong enough), but feel free to play with things and download the files. I uploaded the latest STL,... [read more]

Last year I ventured into the world of 3D printing when one of my friends gave me an old Airwolf 3D printer. It required a lot of tinkering to get good prints, and I learned... [read more]