General

My deck’s railing broke last winter due to some snow falling off the roof and onto it. I needed a way to make some log tenons to repair broke pieces. I searched around on the... [read more]

I wanted a slightly larger size than Lotus Bowl #1, and I realized I could turn it slightly to get a larger piece out of the same limited Y axis that I have on my... [read more]

Following up my last post on the Lotus Bowl Video. Here are a few photos of my latest CNC woodworking art piece. This bowl is rather small; I’d really like to make bigger bowls, but... [read more]

In this video I show how I made my new Lotus Bowl. I was inspired by the lotus flower, and wanted to create a shape that would have lots of overlapping features. The first bowl... [read more]

In this video I want to show everyone my new shop and discuss some of the design and layout ideas I had for my tools. I covered a lot of the basic stuff here on... [read more]

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]

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]

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 made a few of the heart bowls on my CNC machine out of redwood and hard maple. Check out the CNC Heart Bowl video over on YouTube to watch me making them. I had... [read more]

YouTube’s automated song detection software is generally terrible, as I have gotten three or four incorrect violations in the past and the songs barely even match. However, in this case it was an exact match,... [read more]

My website has always been a labor of love. I originally started it when I was about 14 years old in 1992 as a way of showing the world my treehouse. It then became a... [read more]

I’ve been spending some time creating vector images out of photographs. My main purpose was to be able to create some cool stencils and vinyl stickers. Check out Making Vector Images from Pictures for Vinyl... [read more]

I recently got a used Lance truck camper to be put on my 2012 F250 long bed truck. The F-250 has it’s backup camera in the tailgate and puts the display inside the mirror. The... [read more]

Check out this video of us brewing beer in my garage.

I like automated vacuum cleaners. They keep the house looking tidy with minimal effort. Roomba vacuums are the quite popular and have been around for a long time, but they aren’t too smart and do a... [read more]

Electric Mini Boat! My friend Josh at rapid whale came up with this awesome mini boat powered by a 12v battery. Check out more details on his Mini Boat page.

Eisley, the super shiba mutt, goes for a bike chase in Moab on the Slickrock trail!

Here I hack together a custom tap handle for my homebrew kegerator setup. Some quick work on my lathe followed by a little bit of minimal woodworking to get something looks a lot better than the stock handle.

Late last year, Lexi told me that she wanted to go to Japan. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan and I figured this would be an awesome opportunity for me to go check out... [read more]

In October 2016 I got a wooden kayak kit. In February 2017 it finally hit the water! It took a little longer than I expected, but I’m happy with the result! Here I am taking... [read more]

Happy days are here! Actually, most all my days are happy days, but the kayak is done! I installed the seat and hatch straps. The seat is just some foam glued in, and in the... [read more]

I did some wet sanding on the kayak after the first coat. The directions say to use 400 grit, but I wet sanded the first two coats with 320, and then switched to 400 for... [read more]

I was gone for a few weeks in Japan, so progress on the kayak has been slow. I’m back to doing some work on it. First I had to sand it a ton. 80 grit,... [read more]

   

Okay! Progress is happening when I have spare time. I glued on the cowling around the opening, cut it to fit and sanded it smooth. The glue-up was a bit tricky…I didn’t have quite enough... [read more]

I used 4oz fiberglass on top, per the instructions in the kit. I was afraid I was going to run out of epoxy hardener, so I only glassed half of the boat at first. This... [read more]

I’ve been busy having fun doing other things, so the kayak progress isn’t too fast. Yesterday I finished rounding off the corners of the top, and sanded through all the grits from 80 on up... [read more]

The next big step in the kayak was to glue the top on. First you put a coat of unthickened epoxy on the bottom side of the top piece, and then use thickened (cab-o-sil) epoxy... [read more]

The next step in my kayak building journey was to plane the end clamps. These need a specific radius that changes depending on where you are along the top of the boat. The kit includes... [read more]

The next big step is to glass the hull bottom. I sanded down the putty with 80 grit, and then went through all the grades all over the kayak: 100/120/150/220.   You then cover it with... [read more]