A Community Network

 Let me describe and idea for you. I’ll start with a question or two. 

In what kind of community do we want to live? Is it a community where we live in isolation, disconnected from our neighbours, commuting in and out of the neighbourhood for work, leisure and meaningful relationships?

I believe most of us would like to live in a community where we feel some kind of connection. Connection is important. Johan Hari in his book Lost Connections lists disconnection from other people as one of nine possible causes of depression.

This idea of a connected community is not some utopian dream where everything is good and there are no problems to solve. It might well be that a given problem is what drives us to connectedness. But we ought not to allow the problems to set the whole agenda. Rather we should strive to become a community defined by what brings us together, what we share, how we enable each other to thrive, to live a good life. 

In their book The Connected Community, Cormac Russell and John McKnight define this good life in terms of local relationships and connections rather than consumerism. Working together as neighbours and communities to create a sustainable and meaningful future. They argue that healthy, thriving communities are built on strong relationships between neighbours. Social connection is not just a “nice to have,” but a key driver of wellbeing, safety, and resilience.

To become a connected community we need to understand:

What we know as a community?

What we have as a community?

What we love as a community?

What we miss and what can we do about it?

As we begin to answer these questions we begin to discover the building blocks of connecting. Things like the gifts, skills, passions, experience and knowledge that residents contribute to the collective well-being of the neighbourhood. Clubs, groups, small local organisations and networks who create the vision and implement the actions required to make their vision come true. 

This is at the heart of the vision for a Community Network. It is: 

A broad association of groups, individuals & services who build community and serve the community.

It’s not a formalised entity and it’s certainly not just a list of people, groups and businesses, important as that may be. It’s about relationships, a loose series of flexible connections the goal of which is to build a connected community where everyone has the opportunity to thrive, contribute to and participate in community life. 

Of course there are lots of things to work through. But remember this is about relationships. It is built upon knowing each other and sharing our passions, gifts and skills. It is a bottom up not top down model of problem solving, an opportunity for creating and care-giving in the neighbourhood. It’s about being connected to one another.

In fact it’s about a shift from being consumers to being citizens of our neighbourhood. Being consumers allows the likes of Amazon, Starbucks and Apple to write our story for us. Becoming citizens gives us the agency to write our own story for our own community.

I grew up in the countryside. When we walked anywhere you listened to the sounds of birds and animals and the occasional car. Then came the Walkman and the iPod. As someone wryly observed: we didn’t know we needed to carry our whole music library with us until Steve Jobs told us we did. 

In his book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, Jon Alexander describes three stories of the self. These are:

The subject story. People were dependent on rulers and a ruling class.

The consumer story. People are independent they became individualistic consumers focused on choice and self-interest.

The citizen story. People are empowered to co-create solutions and build better communities.

This new, emerging narrative challenges the narrative of consumerism and opens the door to participation with creativity, cooperation, and care. Real change can happen when people are trusted, included, and invited to contribute. 

As Alexander puts it:

In order to survive and thrive, we need to step into the Citizen Story. We must see ourselves as Citizens - people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to their communities and institutions, who can imagine a different and better life, who care and take responsibility, and who create opportunities for others to do the same.

So where would you start? Let me share an example in which I am personally involved. 

We live on the newest part of an expanding community. There’s a piece of ground that has been left largely untouched for probably the whole period of development. This is because it will come under the Borough Council once adopted. But for now no one looks after it. Well no one until recently. Walking past it I regularly wondered what could be done and by whom.When I found out that it didn’t come under any management and was waiting to be adopted by the council I decided someone ought to do something. So I set off with my lawn mower and began to cut the grass and do a bit of weeding. There are now four of us who are trying to get the weeds sorted and keep the grass cut. 

We don’t do this for any altruistic reason. It just needed some TLC. It’s the same with things like litter. We can all see it and maybe, without looking to outside agencies to do it for us, we could tackle it ourselves. Through these simple, small-scale activities we can build the connections that might take us towards a more connected community.

Now, let your mind wander and think about the things you could do in your community. About how you can write your own story. Think about the things about which you are passionate that could make a difference to your community.

This is being connected. This is the heart and soul of a community network. 

This an adapted version of a piece I wrote for our community website in the UK.

No, we don't have a wood burner

 

I'm so glad we didn't decide to fit a wood burner when we bought our current house. Instead we took the chimney out and eventually had a new, high efficiency boiler fitted. 12 years on, if we were renovating it now, we would probably be looking at a heat pump, but that's a discussion for another day.

I ought to say that there was a time I would have gone down the wood burner road. Seeking to move away from fossil fuels, wood burning seemed more sustainable and less impactful on the environment. But then comes the bad news. Even wood burners that meet the most recent criteria for emissions are actually very bad for the environment. 

One study shows that wood burning stoves that meet the regulations still emit 750 times more small particulate matter (PM2.5) than a heavy good vehicle, and that domestic wood burners are the single biggest source of PM2.5 air pollution in the UK, producing three times more pollution than road traffic. And the problem isn't just what goes up the chimney. These microscopic particles (PM2.5 refers to particles that are 2.5 microns in size) pass directly into the blood stream once they enter the lungs and every time you open the door of your stove, they are released into the room. 

Along with the particulates two dangerous chemicals are also released. Benzene and formaldehyde are both known carcinogens and are by products of burning wood. 

So they might look nice and cosy, they might be nice and warm and they be reducing the amount you have to spend on gas or oil, but they are not the long term solution to home heating and reducing our use of fossil fuels. 

Building a Portable Outdoor Kitchen

 These have a wide variety of names in America, but essentially they're boxes designed for use as an outdoor kitchen. So I'll call mine POK_1, because it's the first iteration of my version.

Having seen a couple of videos I sat down and drew out my basic concept. I decided on 800mm as the overall  height, split equally between the base and the box. I thought this would give a reasonable working height. I'm 6'3", so I usually make things too high for other people. Hopefully not this time.

The end product was a little different to the drawing, but the overall dimensions didn't change at 400mm tall and deep and 600mm wide. 

All the wood, apart from a piece of 3.5mm ply was sitting around the workshop. The cabinet was made from 12mm ply and the drawers from some 9mm and 5mm ply I had lying around.

The top was glued and pinned to the sides as a butt joint, the sides were set in a rebate in the bottom panels with more glue and pins. I just thought it look a bit neater this way.

The doors were made as simple boxes, butt jointed, glued and pinned again, with a thin ply skin on the outside. My nail gun jammed and sprayed pins into the ply in random amounts, making quite the mess before I fixed it properly. As this was just a prototype I wasn't overly concerned. The biggest problem was the bow in the 12mm ply. I had to change the design to have a vertical divider to spread the top. For some reason I didn't notice the bow until after I'd glued the basic box together. Had I seen it, I'd have turned the top over and used the divider to pull it together rather than push it apart. 

Here I've assembled the box having cut grooves for the drawer runners using the table saw.

There are two fold out flaps to provide extra working space. Once the doors were made, I could move onto the base. This was made from 18mm ply using pocket hole joinery. It's designed to slip over the main box to make it more compact to carry and also to lock the doors shut.

It has a frame on which the main cabinet sits set about 6mm from the top.

It slides neatly into place and is very stable when used as the stand. I made a couple of simple drawers with finger pulls and a shelf to fi t into the right hand side. I also added a shelf to one door with a couple of retainers so anything stored there doesn't just fall out when you open the doors. The doors also act as supports for the top flaps.

Overall I'm quite pleased with the design, but it needs to be put to the test. After I'd finished it I decided to make a small table that would sit inside the top of the frame for carrying and then could be used as a small coffee table when out to keep things off the ground.

If I could start a movement

 In previous post I talked about writing about an idea, an idea to start a movement. I suggested a very simple aim: To leave the world in a better state than we found it. 

This is an environmental challenge but it is also a socio-economic one too. It's about a sustainable and equitable world. More and more wealth is being concentrated in a decreasing proportion of the population.  A little bit of research shows that in 2018 there were over 2,000 billionaires worldwide. That was an increase of 40% in a 5 year period. But that's not the only significant figure. The wealthy saw their wealth grow at a staggering rate. Elon Musk, for example, added over $120 billion to his fortune in 2021 alone.

Clearly our economic systems are skewed and it might be time we asked whether billionaires ought to exist at all in an equitable economic landscape. But money and wealth are not the only problem. The burden of government policy also has a role to play as do some parts of the media. Much of our (UK) recent government policies have disproportionally impacted the poorer parts of our communities. One simple example is that if you're not earning enough to pay income tax, then either raising the threshold for paying tax or lowering the rate of tax (particularly at the high end) doesn't benefit you at all. Whereas rating the levels of VAT or duty does. 

So something needs to change and we may need to be willing to pay more in order to make those changes. Of course some parts of the media will always present ideas that seek to bring about such change as a danger to the very fabric of our lifestyles. But the bottom line is that if we are going to make the sort of wholesale changes that are needed to avert the climate emergency and create a more sustainable and equitable future, it has to be properly funded and the rich are going to have to pay their share. 

Having said all of that, what might this movement look like? Here are some thoughts.

What is the core idea?

To harness and leverage the skills, knowledge and influence of the “retired” generation to campaign and work to leave the planet in a better place than when we inherited it. Working together we add our collective voice to those of the younger generation to encourage, and support their efforts to bring about a more sustainable and equitable world.

The How

In no apparent order, here are some ideas:

• Encourage personal change

We can’t change the world as individuals and yet we can’t wait for someone else to charge it for us. The change begins with us. If we make small, individual changes (fly less often, choose a hybrid or electric car, lower the thermostat etc) we can contribute to a collective movement for change.

• Be trendsetters and let others follow
• Challenge business and government to be bold
• Invest ethically and environmentally
• Learn to repair and recycle stuff (I saved us over £300 by repairing a Kenwood Chef mixer!)
• Develop a course if you have skills to pass on. 
• Become better informed about climate science, economics, alternative energy.
• Change one product you purchase regularly for a sustainable alternative.

Bigger ideas?

• Arrange web based seminars on topics like climate, finance etc. 
• Find resources to help inform/act/change
• Build community based action groups
• Engage with environmentally positive business/projects. Eg wind farms, solar farms.

Can this happen? It can if we make the effort. 

Bigger things to do

 Some things are simple, fairly inexpensive things we can all do to reduce our carbon footprint. Some things fall into a more expensive category. Here are some we've done.

1. Invest in a solar array. We had solar panels fitted in 2018 or 19 (I can't quite remember). We also had a battery storage system fitted (2.4Kw). Our array can generate up to 4Kw (the maximum you can have in the UK when it's connected to the grid system). The cost of the system fully installed was around £6000. We've saved around 33% on our grid electricity usage, dropping from 3500kwh to 2500kwh. At current rates, that's about £200 a year for us. We also export some power to the grid which I think gives us around £150 a year back. Over the expected lifetime of the system it's doubtful that it will pay for itself, but that's not why we did it.

2. Invest in a wind farm. Not as crazy as it might sound. In the UK there's an organisation called Ripple Energy. They allow you to buy shares in a cooperative that builds and runs wind farms. you get savings back through your supplier. Compared to solar panels it's cheaper and of course you can take it with you when you move unlike a solar array. There's a limit to how much you can invest, but because you can take it with you, it will pay for itself eventually. 

3. Go EV. We bought an EV recently. Again it was an environmental decision rather than a financial one. Although having said that the EV we chose (Vauxhall Mokka e) was a very similar price to our Toyota CHR hybrid. The running costs are much lower (no road fund licence at the moment, no petrol), On the road in the UK it was about £32000 new. Not a cheap option. We had a home charge-point fitted and generally the car gets charged once a week or maybe 10 days.  electricity prices as they are it costs around £10-11 to charge the car at home. That gives me around 160-180 miles. Compare that to my hybrid that would use about £50-60 of fuel and it's still good value.

4. Add cavity wall insulation. We've had a quote of £1400 to insulate our 3 bed-semi. 

5. Replace the double glazing. We have DG but we could replace it with something more efficient for around £6000.

So none of these things are cheap, and some maybe more cost-effective or have a better RTO (return on investment). You have to decide what is best for you and why you are doing some things. Is it environmental or is it about reducing your bills.

What can "I" do?

 This is a generalised "I" because it's really about what we can do, but it can't be me prescribing a list of things for you to do that I'm not prepared to do myself. Some things are high cost like solar panels or buying an electric car, but some things can be low cost like choosing something with less plastic packaging.

So here are a few things that we are doing or considering doing to change out footprint in the world.

1. Buy fewer clothes. It's astonishing to realise the amount of clothing that is wasted each year. About 30% of unwanted clothing ends up in landfill in the UK alone. That's around £140M of useable clothing. 

2. Use our heating systems differently. You'd think that some people think their heating system is designed to make their homes a tropical paradise. You could have an AI based thermostat system fitted (We have a Nest system) that learns your habits and controls you heating so that the house isn't heated when no one is there. Or you could simply turn the thermostat down when you go out and back up when you get home. And wear a jumper! 

3. Buy shower gel and shampoo in larger quantities and refill those single use bottles or have dispensers that you refill. We buy ours in 5l bottles (yes they are plastic) and decant into smaller bottles for use in the shower. I reckon we've taken between 12 and 20 single use bottles out of our footprint by doing this.

4. Don't waste money on water. A number of companies (Smol, Homethings) sell cleaning products in tablet form. You just add the water rather than paying for it and transporting it home. We haven't done this yet, but it's definitely on the list to explore.

There are just four ideas. There's plenty more we can be doing as individuals got have a positive impact on  our planet. The plastic problem won't go away overnight, but we can do something about it.  It is not an overwhelming problem without any workable solutions. We just need to make some choices.

A Change of Direction

 This blog has always been a bit of a mixture of things. I've talked about woodwork, railway modelling, theology and probably a few things I can't even remember. I've also used it as a place to store ideas, articles and links. Writing that makes me realise that at the very least this blog reflects who I am and how my life has changed over the decades.

So I'm going to add a new stream to my thoughts. There's a project idea that's been wandering aimlessly around my mind for some time now. My background is quite diverse, but work began in R&D after completing my degree in Environmental Science and Chemistry. A lot has changed since then but what remains true, and has become more urgent, is that we are having a deeply damaging impact on the environment and time is running out to do something about it. It is that serious.

The problem is that although we know we must act, we're not sure anything we do as individuals will make a difference. I had this conversation with a friend of mine some time ago. He was very supportive of the things I was doing because I knew things needed to change and I wanted to be part of the change. But his attitude was almost to suggest that I was wasting my time because one person can't make a difference.

Well I think otherwise. One person can make a difference and, if that one person can inspire another, then two people can make twice the difference. It's a matter of simple maths. One becomes two, then four then eight and the change becomes exponential. 

So what's my change of direction? Well, I'm going to start writing about an idea I have for a movement. It sounds grand that way, but why not? Why not start a movement? The movement has a simple aim: To leave the world in a better state than we found it. This is an environmental challenge but it is also a socio-economic one too. It's about a sustainable and equitable world. 

I know that this blog has very little traction and very few people stumble across it. I'm not looking to become well-known, I just want my grandsons to inherit a better world. Perhaps you will join me on the adventure.

Building a mud kitchen

 I have two grandsons and decided to make a mud kitchen for them as a Christmas present. I toyed with the idea of taking a couple of pallets and cutting one down to make the top and sides and the other as the back. Instead of that I decided to make it from scratch using some pallet wood and some stud timber (CLS timber 63x38mm).

I started off with a simple drawing of what I thought it might look like and with some rough dimensions. 

The basic construction used butt joint reinforced with through dowels. The back splash was a separate piece to make getting into a car easier. Although the finished piece was only 1m tall and about 770mm wide.

I took the stud timber and cut the pieces to length before running them through the table saw to square them up. The off-cuts formed the bottom shelf.

The base was assembled sides first before adding the front and back rails. An off cut of the stud timber was used to set the height of the bottom rails and then the other off-cuts were used to make the bottom shelf. These were glued and pinned in place. The spacing was a bit of trial and error using pieces of MDF/ply until I found a good enough fit.

Once this was all dry it was sanded down and painted using a garden paint.

The top and backsplash were made from pallet wood. Several pieces were glued together to form the worktop. The backsplash was pinned and glued to the frame as individual strips.

A simple shelf was added with the "deliberate" mistake of putting the supports in the wrong place! Then more sanding and an exterior varnish to protect the wood.

Next I needed to make a sink and hob. The sink was made from a mixing bowl I picked up on Amazon. I drew round it then marked a line inset from the edge before cutting it out carefully with the jigsaw. The cut-out and a couple of other pieces of pallet wood were made into the hot plates. 

There are many ways to cut circles, but one of the quickest I've found is to use the table saw. A simple jig allows you to trim away the edges. You just need to go carefully. 

The control knobs were cut using a hole saw, a screw and washer allow them to turn freely. The finishing touch was to make the curved top and get a sign made. I used Etsy for the sign.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out. I ended up making a crate as storage space. I hope the boys enjoy playing with it as much as I enjoyed making it for them.

Disciplined Choices: The Search for Good Habits

 I seem the remember reading somewhere that it takes 3 months to build a new habit. I assume that was a good habit because a bad habit takes only a few seconds in my experience! And therein lies the problem. As far as I can tell, and from my own experience, some good habits don't just take time to become fixed, they take discipline. A lot of discipline, and quite a bit of failure too.

I'd argue that failure is possibly an intrinsic part of the process of learning the importance of discipline. You learn, through failure, that will power is the stuff of dreams whereas discipline belongs to the world of reality. Some people think that the two are synonymous, but I'm not convinced. 

When I changed my eating habits some years ago I was told I must have a lot of will power, but that simply wasn't true. In fact I'd say I had very little will power at all. What I did have was a goal, some data and the ability to make disciplined choices. Every day began with a disciplined choice and proceeded with a series of discipline choices. No magic bullet, no trying to suppress cravings. Just a series of choices.

Any good habits I now have are sustained by disciplined choices. That's the essential difference between good and bad habits. Bad habits take no discipline at all. Good habits demand continued vigilance. It's so easy to skip a day which then becomes two days and so on. Being lazy takes no effort, dragging yourself out of bed on a cold, wet, dark November morning to run or walk a few miles requires a massive effort for most of us. Who wouldn't rather curl up under a warn blanket than have freezing rain driving into your face? 

So how do you become a disciplined choice maker? At the risk of sounding trite or simplistic, you just do it. You set a goal, and then make decisions that support that goal. If you want to walk 10k steps a day, then make choices that help you achieve that goal. It might mean getting up 30 minutes earlier so you can walk to the station rather than catch the bus or get a lift. 

Being a disciplined choice maker goes beyond weight loss or exercise or giving up smoking etc. It can be about something as simple of developing a new skill, learning a language. Or it could be about becoming an encourager rather than a critic, reading 10 books a year, keeping a journal. Whatever it is I'm pretty sure that it will take discipline to achieve.

And when you fail? Well you just start over. Every day is a new opportunity to make new choices. If you make it all about will power it becomes easy to succumb to the idea that you just don't have enough of it to succeed. On the other hand everyone has the capacity to make disciplined choices. Even you. Even me.

Quick update on the table

 Here's a photo of the table with the finish applied and the "Egg" installed!

BBQ Table Completed

To be honest it's not really a BBQ table, it's actually for one of those outdoor oven/grill things that look like a rather large egg as I said before, but I'm not sure what else to call it.

In the end I made it from reject scaffold boards, some of which had some significant splits in them. I managed to get everything I needed cut from 5 boards (3900mm long). 

I cut the hole using a jigsaw in the end. Making a circle cutting jig for the router would have given a neater result, but it will be covered by a lip on the oven and any unevenness in the cut adds to the rustic charm!

I filled some of the cracks with hot melt glue, which worked ok, but it needs some slower curing glue if that's possible. The glue sticks I've got set very quickly and it left a lot of clean-up work to be done. I've seen a hot melt system for repairs and filling, so I might look at getting one of those to try for the next project. 

The client is applying the finish and it will be interesting to see how it looks after that has been done and the oven is in place. 

A BBQ Table: The design stage

 I've been asked to design and build a specialised table for a BBQ. Well actually it's more like an outdoor oven in the shape of a rather large egg. You can buy these things with a table, but my client has a very specific space so they need something made-to-measure.

I'm going to try something different and use some scaffold boards to build it. Here's the basic plan:

I'm still working on checking all the dimensions, but the basic idea is a rustic looking, sturdy table into which the "egg" sits. 

Cutting the hole will be interesting. I'll probably make a jig for my router and get a kitchen worktop router cutter and then just take it steady. 

It will need to be made in sections that can be put together on site because I don't have a truck to transport it and anyway I suspect it's going to quite heavy once assembled!

A couple of ideas for simple projects that I might try making to sell

 I'm not sure if, or even whether, I want to try and make money from woodwork. I'm certainly not going to pretend to be a master cabinet maker, but the more you do the better you get. So while watching a few videos recently, I thought I'd have a go at making a couple of things that might have a market if I can find it.

The first is a reproduction of a traditional wine crate. It's approximately 400mm square and it was quite simple to make. I bought a 2.4m board 18mmx144mm for there side panels and cut down some leftover cladding to make the slats. The slats are 40mm wide and about 7 or 8mm thick. 

The hand slots are cut using a template and a router fitted with a bushing. You can of course make them using a forester bit or a flat blade bit or even a hole saw and the use a jigsaw or coping saw to cut out the centre section. 

The second pice I made was a reproduction of an old rustic tool tote. Very simple to make from more of the 2.4m board. 

It's about 430mm long and 140mm wide. The end panels have a corner cut off. The panel is 300mm tall and the cut-off is 40mm in from the top edge and 140mm up from the bottom edge. I set up my tapering jig on the table saw and simple ran the pieces throng on both sides. The handle is 400mm wide and the whole thing is assembled using glue and brads. The end panels are actually screwed and glued to the base panel because they were a little bit cupped and I thought screws would give a more secure fixing for this prototype.

The finish is an "Antique Pine" wax.

The minimum I would want to sell something like this is probably around the £15 mark. I think I could produce them at around 4/hr if I batch processed them. I reckon each one has about £7-£8 worth of materials, so £15 would cover the costs and the time spent making them. I'm guessing the cost of materials would come down a little bit if I were to buy the wood to make say 10 of each in one go. But I'm not sure how fast I could batch them out!

A simple cupboard/enclosure for a hallway

 A friend asked me to build a simple cabinet for them to replace one the was falling apart. They delivered the old cabinet for me to use as a template and I started by doing a simple drawing using Graphic. I've tried Sketchup but never really got on with it for some reason.

Here's the basic idea I developed.

As you can see it's a simple double door cabinet. The challenge was to make it to the same dimensions as the original but because I was using 18mm MDF, the internal dimensions were the critical ones as long as there was space around the outside.

I decided to follow the original as closely as I could because I didn't know what it was covering (some electrical stuff I was told).

The cupboard was only 65mm deep.

I didn't want the rails and stiles on the doors to be too wide because I thought that would make the panel too narrow so I decided on 40mm and that seemed teamwork out okay.

Here's a picture of the cupboard with the doors clamped in place as a test fit before painting.

I think the proportions look okay. 

The next stage was sanding everything down and then preparing it all for painting.

I used a water based primer/undercoat, lightly sanded between coats. The client was doing the final painting, so I did there coats to get it to a reasonable finish. 

Once I was happy with the finish I added the hinges and door knobs. The hinges are simple flush hinges, but that's not the whole story. Initially I went to my local DIY store and got some hinges. Ther problem with them is that they are not that well made and some of the screws do not sit fully into the countersink. In fact so poorly made were these hinges that some of the countersinks barely cut the surface. 

The upshot of which is that the doors don't close properly.

The solution was to buy better quality hinges, sourced from a company specialising in ironmongery. Theres were thicker and far superior quality that the ones from the DIY store.

The inside of the original doors had hooks for keys. This posed a little bit of a problem because the inner panel was only 6mm thick and I had planned to put in some extra pieces into which the hooks could be mounted. Unfortunately 12mm wasn't quite enough to ensure the hooks didn't come through the other side, so I had to add an extra layer. In hindsight I could have designed this better, but I'm not sure how.

The final touch was to add a magnetic catch for each door and the job was done.

The panel doors came out okay. I cut the rebate for them on the table saw rather than setting up the router table. I think next time I'll probably use the router, the table saw was ok but it's a bit fiddly to to get the set-up correct. Still, it worked and the client is happy. 

Simple Storage for the Utility Room

 Our utility room is a mess. We have loads of stuff that needs sorting and the storage is a mixture of old bits of furniture that was in the garage already and shelves that we brought with us or bought to try and make better use of the space. 

The first step was to improve the storage around the washing machine and freezer. This was going to take the shape of some custom made shelves the would store basic item including the cat baskets!

I made this is two parts, a deeper section with two fixed shelves and a shallower version with one fixed shelf and two adjustable shelves (I decided not to have the three I initially put in the drawing). 

In case you're interested the drawing software is Graphic for Mac. It's very useful for creating simple 2D drawings for this sort of project.

The units were built using pocket holes which presented a challenge in the narrow unit because I didn't think about the drill/driver being too big to get inside the unit with the pocket hole driver bit in it. 

I got there in the end, but it was a real faff. The shelf pin holes were made using a Kreg jig. This is a very useful tool. A simple spacer (a piece of ply cut to size) helps to position the jig at its starting point and then you can drill a series of holes equally spaced. If you need more there's a locating pin to reposition the jig. You just need to take your time setting things up properly. I got my jig for about £35.

We've recently bought a battery powered lawn mower so I've attached the charger to the end panel of the unit and the batteries live on the shelf with the charger and battery for the trimmer we were given years ago. This gives us a nice, convenient way to store and charge the batteries.

The next thing we decided to make was a storage unit to fit between the freezer and washing machine.

Nothing too complicated, just a pull-out unit with storage for washing powder, water softener etc. Again pocket holes were used to secure the bottom to the front and back panels, and 30mm brad nails for the rails. 

I found some old castors from a previous project and a handle from a wardrobe I dismantled 8 years ago. The wood from the wardrobe was used to build a cupboard to hide some pipes and to construct one of my benches, so nothing goes to waste if we can help it!

Once finished, the unit slides nicely between the two appliances.

The next job will be to sort out the rest of the storage, making better use of the space. We might even be able to get into the cupboards currently buried behind the stuff we haven't sorted out yet!!

 

Making routed panels for drawer cabinets without a router!

I wanted to do a quick post about making panels with rebates in them without using a router. You still need at least a circular saw, but if you don't have a router you can make these panels using two layers of material. 

I chose 9mm and 6mm MDF because I had some in the workshop. 12 and 6 or two pieces of 9mm would give you an 18mm thick panel which would be the standard thickness I use to build cabinets.

I cut my base layer (9mm board) to the height of the finished panel (800mm) and to the width of two panels plus a bit of waste (1200mm). The 6mm sheet was cut into 1200mm by 74mm strips. I've posted before about how I used a saw board with a circular saw to make treatable cuts.

You need to make some spacers for assembly and I made mine 14mm wide. Just cut one piece long enough to split into three. Oh and I cut a 20mm wide strip to go on the bottom of the panel as a starting point. This also allows me to use an 18mm thick base or stretcher at the bottom and it leaves a 2mm gap to the bottom runner.

It was then a matter of using the spacers to position the 6mm strip, check it for square and glue and pin it in position. Move the spacers and repeat all the way up. Before you start pinning, mark up where you are going to cut the assembled panel into two pieces. I did this on the first 6mm board. This is where you don't want to put any pins! Saw blades don't like nails or screws.

Once the glue is dry you can cut the panels to width and make your cabinet.

So why 74mm? It just so happens that the cabinets I make to go under the benches work on an 88mm spacing so 74mm with a 14mm gap gives me 88mm. Of course it doesn't work with the 800mm panels, but they were made to fit into a different bench. 

If you don't want to use that much 6mm board, you could rip it to say 20mm wide and then use a wider spacer to position it. The starting point is to work out the internal height of the cabinet and then work out how many drawers you can fit in the space. I make my drawers from 12mm material, so I use a runner width of 14mm. 

Say I was building a cabinet with internal dimensions of 722mm, and I want to have space for 6 single height drawers in it. I subtract 2mm for the clearance at the bottom of the cabinet and divide 720 by 6. The gives me 120mm for each drawer space. A 14mm space for the runner leaves 106mm for the drawer. Then it's just a matter of cutting the runners and spacer to watch those measurements. Depending on how you make the drawer, you need to leave 2mm at the top so it doesn't bind on the drawer above.

These are trays rather than drawers but the principle is the same. It's basically a box with a base that runs in the slots in the side panel. Because these slots are made with a router they're a bit deeper than 6mm, but only by a 1-2mm. By sheer chance that meant the the sides of the drawers were 9mm in from the edge, so I cut a couple of 9mm spaces so I could position the sides in from the edge and then squaring it up to the front and back, I glued and pinned the base in place. 

I might take some better photos of a drawer and see if I can explain it better, but it's essentially the same process that I used in an earlier post but without the rebates to square it all up.

Over-engineering a hinge for a boom arm

 Everyone who uses power tools to sand wood and uses some form of hose attachment  for dust collection, knows what a pain it is dragging the hose and cable across the bench. It often catches and pulls off the tool or gets twisted up. Far better to have the power and use dropping from above.

There are lots of ways to do this. My solution was to build a boom arm that swings out across the work space. I thought this would be the easiest and neatest solution, but I didn't figure with the issues I'd face with the hinge system that allows the arm to swing. The weight of the arm and hose produces quite a force on the hinge, pulling it down and away. 

I tired an ordinary butt hinge and a gate hinge, but neither worked well. I then made my own from threaded rod and 18mm ply, but that too wasn't able to support the arm as well as I wanted.

So I went for this:

This is it clamped together for a test fit. It's made from 18mm ply and rotates on a 20mm Aluminium tube shaft. The boom arm (made from 12mm and 6mm MDF in the arm of an I-beam) fits into a couple of slots.

The hope is that the central shaft and the shape of the hinge will offer better support.

I made a wall plate from more 18mm ply along with with a base and top plate for the shaft.

I bolted the whole thing together with M6 bolts. 

In order to make sure everything lined up, I used double-sided tape to assemble the hinge block with a piece of scrap where the boom would be fixed in place. I then counter-bored a 10mm hole in one side before drilling all the way through with a 7mm bit.

The 10mm hole is just the right side to allow the head of an M6 bolt to be driven in and head tight without splitting the ply. It's neater if you line the head uo with the grain, but it doesn't seem to make a big difference.

Once all the holes were drilled I separated the parts and then reassembled it with the boom arm in place and carefully drilled through the arm.

You'll see in the pictures that there are grooves. These are to take top the shape of the beam. To make it easy I added shims to the inner part of the beam so that everything clamped together nice an tightly.

The wall plate and other part of the hinge was again made from 18mm ply. This is all scrap wood I had around the place by the way.

20mm holes bored out using a spade bit and than all screws together with the bottom section glued in place but the top only screwed in to make dismantling a little easier if I every need to do that.

And there it is. It seems to work okay, although I might need to shim the wall plate because the wall in a little uneven. The hose and power cable is simply cable-tied to the arm and I can make connections as I need them. It works really well for both routing and sanding, so I'm pleased with the eventual outcome.

The new thing I didn't take into account is that the roof slopes from to back which means that long ladder you can see is lower at the from of the photo than at the back. The arm just clears the front, but had I set it 5-10mm higher wouldn't have cleared the ladder and I would have had to take it off the wall and repositioned it. 

Thankfully I got away with it, but only just!

Building a flip-top tool cart

 I've seen plenty of examples of flip-top carts and have thought about building one for a long time. I have a disc/belt sander that could do with a more permanent home and I have and simple drill press stand for my old Black and Decker Mains power drill bought back in 19879/80. I made a bigger table stand for the drill years ago, but that could do with improving.

So I did a quick drawing in Graphic of my design. I'm quite tall (1.90m) so I like my tools and benched to be a bit higher than most people. My benches are 90cm tall, so I designed this flip cart to be about the same.

The body is made from 18mm ply with space for a drawer. The top is made from two pieces of 18mm ply  separated by 25mm, the diameter of the aluminium tube on which the top rotates.

The tube was more like 26mm or the drill bit was more like 24, either way it was too tight and needed adjusting. Not easy once the initial hole had been prepared. The moral of the story being don't drill the hole until you've got the tube!

Apart from that it all came together nicely. I used 50mm bolt catches on the four corners to lock the top in place. 

In order to get them lined up I installed the catches on one face then flipped the top and added the bit that receives the the bolt on the other side. I then added the other catches using the receiving bit to set the position of the bolt.

I didn't bother with any fancy drawer slides, just waxed the bottom of the drawer itself.

The belt sander is bolted to the top. I used M6 bolts. I counter-bored from the inside just enough to be able to hammer the bolts in. The drill press was just screwed down.

The top rotates easily and it's already been put to use. There drill press was tucked away in ne corner of the bench and often had accumulated bits and pieces on it, making it a pain to get out and set up. Now four bolts, a quick spin, and it's already for use. 

More storage and workshop projects

 SoI've busy in the workshop. I usually do a few things over Christmas, but we're also in lockdown again so there are more things I can work on. Using the same approach as I did for the storage unit I built a second but this time to had trays rather than drawers in it. 

The plastic box in the bottom was replace with two more trays and then I made boxes for nuts, bolts, hinges etc. Although these units are made from MDF, they slide really easily after an application of wax to the runners and slides. 

The boxes were made from 6mm MDF and hardboard simply glued together and held in shape with some tape while the glue dried. No pins. 

I made different sizes but always in multiples of a basic square. That way they can be rearranged within the tray.

The next problem I wanted to try and solve was dust collection from tools used on the bench. Think sanders and track saw.

I watched a few videos of folk making boom arms and some using hooks, rings and string lines. All of them worked and I decided on an arm.

I thought it would be interesting to make my own I-beam from 6 & 12mm MDF that's lying around the place. 

The length was simply the longest pieces I had available, about 1200mm. Having cut some grooved using the table saw it was just a matter of glue and clamps to put it together. A bit of on-the-fly design and I had a hinge bracket and wall mount. 

A piece of hose and a power cable were simply cable tied to the arm and it was ready to go. It works quite well, although the hinge could be better. I might redesign that later. I don't have any photos of the boom arm.

I came across Woby Design and downloaded the plans for his camera mount. Working in metric measurements meant a few adjustments to drill sizes to use metric bolts rather than imperial. Plus a camera mount is a 1/4" thread, but I found a ball head mount that had two M4 threaded inserts.

My workshop is in a garage. It's about 5mx3m with a concrete floor that's cold and hard on the knees when you've been standing for a long time. I didn't want to move everything out so I laid a rubber mat-like tiled floor. I used something called Assemblemat. It's a bit soft for a workshop floor even though they say it can be used in a garage. If  have to do it again I'll use something like Duramat. 

Star decorations from oak flooring

In the run up to Christmas I came across some designs for star decorations. Using some scrap oak flooring and some scrap from a shed I built, this is what I made. There are more!

I used three basic designs. An overlap style, an open star and a smaller closed version made from the offcuts of the open design.