With the layout of our new place, the most obvious, best place for our internet to come into the house is the basement; between the modem, router, switch, etc, I’ve got multiple bits of networking equipment and I’d prefer to not have them just hanging out in one of our main living spaces. Unfortunately, the basement is also my “dirty workshop” where I will be sawing and drilling and painting, so at any particular time there could be particulates floating around that I don’t particularly want getting into my electronics.

As my workshop storage started taking shape downstairs, I hatched a plan and saved a spot for a way to keep those electronics both protected and up off of a surface that could otherwise be a good working surface.

I started by picking up an acrylic display case that was the right size for the items with a nice big door for access. This will keep things protected from particulates, but is easy to see and access and shouldn’t interfere with any wireless signals.

The case isn’t particularly strong, so I needed to support it well in order to mount it to the wall. I quickly cut some old particle board that I’ve had forever to size, and slapped some paint on it to avoid splinters and make it blend in with the wall visually, since I’m not looking to make particle board a focal point. Then some simple shelf brackets.

With those screwed on, it was time to turn my attention to cabling. The obvious downside to a complete box for electronics is that I need to get both power and wired connections in to the equipment. I wanted a single point of access, so it was time to break out the hole saws and carefully cut a hole in the side of the acrylic box.

With that, I got the shelf mounted on the wall, and used a 90 degree PVC angle to protect the access to the box; I’m counting on gravity to be my friend here, nothing can settle in from the top, and very little will float in on its own. I held it in place with some appropriately sized O rings; secure enough for my purposes, but easy to remove and adjust.

The box is probably totally fine sitting on top of that shelf, supporting its weight, but I also wanted to secure it to the wall for extra peace of mind. The backing there is actually wood, so I was able to drill quick holes in the case and screw straight into the wall. However, I don’t want to trust screw heads holding thin acrylic, so I added a nice sturdy mending plate and some stainless washers to give it great, wide support across the back.

Then to start populating!

I thought I might use some weather stripping to close up that access pipe, but honestly I almost misjudged the combined circumference of all the cables, so it took some effort to get the last few in, and they seem to be quite effectively closing the gap on their own.

I secured some of the larger devices in place with command strips, just to keep them in place when I need to adjust cables. Then some work to tidy up the cables and get them nice and organized and out of the way.

Where are all those other cables going? Well, that’ll be another post...

Over the course of this year, I've been working on setting up my workshop space in the basement. One of the particular joys of setting up this new workshop is trying to solve problems that I never managed to in my space in Utah.

One of these is clamp storage. My bread-and-butter clamps are Irwin Quick-Grip clamps, and I've been building up a collection of them over the years, but they were always kind of a mess; the big ones leaning somewhere, smaller ones left on a flat surface. I wanted to come up with a solution where they could have a dedicated space, and given their utility as one-handed clamps, I wanted to make sure it was easy to get them off and put them back.

I started by using a scrap of wood to line up (the majority of) my clamps, so that I could see how much room I'd need to store my existing collection. I did also want to include some baby fat to give myself room to add to my collection, and ended up settling on a pretty aggressive length, almost 200% of what I currently need.

For the larger clamps, I wanted a small lip so that clamps would have a nice positive hold. Rather than trying to add something thin, I elected to use my new table saw to cut a groove to create that lip.

A quick check to look at placement!

I wasn't sure how to support it; I wanted to make sure it was sturdy enough. I was initially considering supporting with 2x4s all the way down to the shelf below, but decided to cut them into triangles so I could anchor them directly into the wall. A quick trip to the drill press to drill out holes for screws, then countersinking screws to connect the clamp surface to the supports.

I used my offcuts to position it nicely on the wall. I drove screws directly into the drywall to mark the screw positions, and then removed and added heavy duty anchors before installing for good.

With that, clamp storage! A good first step to start building workshop storage around.

Finally, that single hand storage capability in practice:

I am going to be very clear about this up-front: a reasonable person would not do this.

A few years ago, we upgraded from our adjustable queen bed to an adjustable split-king. It took us a while to find a king-sized bed frame that we were both happy with, but finally found a Crate & Barrel one that we were both over the moon about. With the adjustable bed bases, the bed frame does not need to actually hold the mattresses, but is built around them to give the bed a nice finished appearance.

Fast-forward to December 2023, we are moving into our new house in Seattle, and starting to discover that our house, which was originally constructed in 1917, had some quirks that made our life a little more difficult—notably, many of the doorways were more narrow than you'd see in a modern construction, and our stairs involve some tight turns.

Most notably, after a full day of movers moving things in, we hit a snag moving the headboard in. Put simply, there was no way to get it upstairs to the master bedroom. No matter how the movers rotated it around, there was simply no way to get it up the stairs. The metal frame around the headboard, which is a single monolithic piece, was simply too big to navigate into the stairwell all the way. The headboard was clearly not designed or intended to be disassembled. We talked about trying to bring it in through a window, even though we weren't sure it could be done safely, but the biggest openable window in the master bedroom was several inches too small. We discussed some destructive possibilities to allow us to get it upstairs, but we expect we'll want to get it back out of that room someday.

We were tired and perhaps a little emotionally raw, and my wife was starting to get a little upset about the prospect of having to get rid of the bed frame that we loved. As I ran through possibilities in my head, I started to formulate a rough plan, so we secured a nearby storage unit and moved the headboard and a few other large items into it, then turned our attention to more immediate settling-in.

February 2024. On a nice Saturday, it was time to get the headboard back out of storage.

We laid it on cardboard in the driveway to protect it as I took the first step. I needed to figure out how to separate the upholstered middle section from the metal frame. I had noted that there were two hex bolts attached to supports under the upholstered section, so I thought I'd start there.

I removed those bolts... and the upholstered section would not budge. It was still very much attached. I got a thin putty knife and started running it between the metal frame and the middle; I could get it all the way through to the other side, but running it up and down found two distinct spots on both sides that something blocked the knife. Without knowing exactly what was underneath the upholstery, it seemed like the next step. I was able to pry up a tack strip and, with a good deal of effort, removed enough staples to access a corner and see what was going on.

I could tell the upholstered section was a wooden construction underneath, with a fairly thin ply surface. I noted that there were two rectangles visible on the side which had separate bits of ply covering them, glued and stapled into place. They corresponded with the places where the frame and middle appeared to be joined, so it was time to open one up and see what was going on.

Success! Well, tentative success. Inside that section, there were two hex bolts, slotted through the wooden construction and threaded into the metal frame. Based on that, I assumed that if there were 3 other rectangular holes with 2 bolts each, and that if I removed all of those, I'd be able to remove the upholstered middle from the metal frame.

Several hours later, primarily due to the difficulty of removing upholstery staples, I'd gotten access to all 4 spots. For a moment, I thought there might be bolts in another part of the frame, but after cutting a hole with a hole saw, I discovered that I was mistaken. I removed all the bolts, putting them in a magnetic parts tray. And with that, The upholstered middle section could be worked free from its pressure fit.

We moved both pieces inside. I had already visualized my next step, but expected it would take a fair amount of effort, so would have to wait a bit before I'd have the time for it.

Late April. Following a vacation to Ireland and more pressing concerns at work and home, it was time to resume.

My goal had become modifying the headboard, not just so I could get it upstairs, but that it would be relatively simple to disassemble and potentially reassemble again in the future. To do that, I needed to make all the bolts accessible. Given that we always put our headboard up against a wall, it didn't have to be pretty, but I wanted to create little pockets that were decently finished.

First, to frame these pockets up. The interior structure of the middle piece was fairly open, with just a few structural wood pieces, and I needed to add significant reinforcement to have decent structure around the walls of each pocket. I was able to jigsaw together wood pieces that could be maneuvered in and attached.

With that completed, I cut new pieces of ply to cover and secured them into place.

Then, to reattach the upholstery. I tacked the tack strips back down, and re-stapled the bottom. The fabric on the bottom edge ended up a little mangled, but it's not visible when the bed is set up, so I chose not to sweat that detail.

I then cut the upholstery where the pockets would go, using fabric tape to seal the edges, and stapled down to the sides.

Next, over the next week I broke out the sewing machine and stitched up fabric covers to go into the pockets. They are a pretty simple construction, creating a box with an open side—I worked out my measurements, cut, stitched the edges, and turned inside out and folded down the top to have a nice clean hem. I then used double-sided fabric tape and staples to secure them into the pockets, cutting a slit to pass the bolts through the slot.

The next weekend, it was time for the step I'd been thinking about and stressing about since the beginning. The metal frame was ultimately the problem for navigating the headboard up the stairs. It was a single monolithic piece, and for this to work, it would need to be two pieces, not one.

I used some wood I had on hand to build some quick support pieces to go in the corners and keep the frame up off the ground, then it was back out to the driveway to cut.

I put a metal cutting wheel on my new angle grinder, and got a machine stand to allow me to make relatively precise 90 degree cuts.

Then, to cut! I tried to go slow and careful, plenty of cutting fluid. I did end up needing to press harder than I expected, and heated the metal enough to discolor slightly once or twice.

I ultimately found the cuts went better standing the frame up on end. The cuts weren't perfectly straight due to having to make adjustments mid-cut, but in the end, I had two pieces.

With that completed, I moved the pieces back into my basement workshop. I needed to clean up the edges, where were a bit jagged; two weeks later, I brought metal files and a deburring tool to bear and cleaned them up.

Now in early May, it was finally time to bring the pieces up to the bedroom and put it together. Even without the metal frame, the upholstered middle was a very tight squeeze; we successfully got it rotated through, leaving only a surface scratch that was easily skimmed over with putty and paint. The metal frame halves came up easily, and I'd achieved the thing that was impossible until that point—the headboard was in our master bedroom, albeit in 3 pieces instead of one.

I then set about reattaching the bolts, which was more challenging than expected. The bolts, clearly not designed for civilians, were very difficult to get aligned and seated back into their threads. With the application of some clamps and spare wood, I was able to finally get all the bolts in place.

... and discovered a problem. The frame appeared to hold a bit of tension, and with it cut, the sides wanted to bow out slightly. Because of where I'd elected to cut it (a strategic decision), one end was held tightly against the upholstered middle, but the other side, being secured a few feet away, bowed out maybe a quarter inch. That was clearly not going to be acceptable, but I was going to have to think about how to address it.

Again, in the face of the difficulty of the next task, I had to wait both to mull over my approach and deal with more pressing needs (some of which will be covered in future posts).

(Late intermission: Aurora Borealis, as captured by me on iPhone camera, May 10, 2024.)

September. I have come up with a plan. I purchased a 1/4" steel rod earlier in the process, thinking I might need to cut a slot and use a rod to keep the pieces from rotating relative to each other, but ultimately deemed it unnecessary. It occurred to me that I could drill out holes in the core of the metal frame and use pieces of steel rod as pins to align and hold the two ends, such that neither would bow out.

My parents were visiting, and this felt like a good project to tackle with my father, from whom I got my DIY sensibilities and who always likes helping me with projects.

The metal frame had a core that was offset to one side, and we determined that we could grind down one edge of the metal rod and fit it in that side, saving us some drilling. We then set to work drilling out holes, as carefully as possible. Cutting fluid, staring with a small metal bit, working up the a 1/4" bit. Slightly imperfect, including a spot where we started blowing out the side, but we ultimately had spots for two pins for each joint.

We cut pins, giving them a bit of rounding with the angle grinder, and then a dry fit. From both the bowing and the angling of the holes we'd drilled, we needed to taper the pins more aggressively, but were able to do that with a grinding wheel on the Dremel.

Then, back upstairs.

Moment of truth! It slots together.

Still a little bit of a trick getting the bolts in, but with the pins holding in alignment, as well as a second pair of hands, significantly easier.

And suddenly... we have a completed headboard!

And just like that, we finally have our bed frame back together.

My wife is very happy with it, as am I. Again—a reasonable person would not do this. But I am not always a reasonable person, and I am willing to spend my energy and ingenuity to keep a piece of furniture that we both loved, not letting it go to waste and not having to compromise on something we like less. In the words of one of my inspirations, “repair, don't replace.”

Seattle catch-up post! After closing on our house last fall, we were excited to introduce the dogs to their new backyard, but there were a few issues with the existing wood fence that I wanted to address to make sure they wouldn't be tempted to escape to explore the neighborhood. I am sure I will fully replace the fence at some point, but for now, some temporary shoring up.

First, to address a section in the corner that was in rough shape.

The nails had pulled out in places, and my first step was pulling out as many other nails as I could to give myself room to operate, and frankly... in this house, we use screws.

After that, it was straightforward to screw in some 2x4 brackets to more securely attach the top rail to the posts, and then rearranged and screwed in slats.

Next, I had a few sections that were generally in good shape, but had rails that had pulled away from the posts.

For this, I broke out some ratchet straps and ran them through the slats on different sections. I ratcheted it together to pull the rail to the post to get my positioning, then released the tension and attached a bracket. Then I tensioned again, pulling the rail into the bracket. It took a little encouraging with a hammer, but I was able to get it slotted in and screwed together, giving me a solid mechanical connection and a much more stable fence.

And with that, the fence was secure enough to bring the dogs over to explore their new backyard for the first time.

They love it!

After the success of my shower curtain rod brackets, I wanted to turn my attention to some other aesthetic touches.

Our shower head has a little chrome piece that sits around the pipe and is supposed to cover the spot where it comes out of the wall, but because of a pipe fitting that juts out a little bit, it wasn't quite deep enough to actually sit flush with the wall. Not a real functional problem, but just a little unsightly.

So I pulled out my calipers, and quickly modeled a second fitting to sit between the wall and the chrome piece.

A quick exercise in Fusion 360 and a single ABS print later, I gave the piece the same paint and enamel treatment that I'd given the brackets, then installed easily.

Based on that, I also thought I might make a fitting to finish the appearance of the spout better — the pipe coming from the wall was left a bit long, so there was a very visible gap between the spout and the tile.

So, I again got the calipers, made some measurements, modeled a piece, printed... and it didn't fit properly at all.

So I iterated, and iterated, and iterated. I refined measurements and adjusted my design to make it easier to install.

The biggest trick is that the pipe is not actually square to the wall. Like, at all. It was never super noticeable, and this kind of issue isn't uncommon in houses, but for this piece, my tolerances needed to be pretty tight — off one direction, there spout didn't fit well, and in the other direction, it would actually push the tiles away from the tub when the spout was tightened.

For the first few iterations, I tried to measure the angle of the pipe to the wall and do the math to account for it, but I eventually gave up and just started printing an iteration, test-fitting it, and then eyeballing the changes I thought I'd need to fit better. It was a slow iterative process, but after 8 or 10 versions, I finally had something that fit properly. As you can see, it's way off-square. But it fits the space perfectly.

Again, paint and enamel to finish, and then it was done!

... and that's it for this chapter of house updates, because as of today, we no longer own that house! In the intervening months, we have actually moved to Seattle. Which will mean new DIY home projects! I've got some unique new challenges. I've also got a new workshop space to build out and set up, so may document that process a bit as well.

We are very excited for the new owners of our old place in Utah. We loved that home, and we had great memories there. We hope they will as well.

Back in April, I took a week off of work as a staycation, and decided to take on a project I’d been thinking about since last summer.

When we bought our house, we put in a curved shower curtain rod. There is a little arch detail at the front of the shower area, preventing us from mounting the brackets on them, but the rod curved enough that there was still plenty of room.

However, after six and a half years, the rod was getting pretty rusty, and I saw that there were new curved shower curtain rods at Home Depot that were “guaranteed not to rust.” Seemed like a good idea, but after taking the old rod down, discovered that the new brackets were significantly wider, pushing the bar further into the shower area due to the arch, and the rod was actually a bit less curved than the old one, so the shower was feeling a bit more cramped.

I didn’t yet own a 3d printer, but this got me thinking, “if I had a 3d printer, I could design and print brackets that fit onto the curvature of the arch.”

So, almost a year later, with a 3d printer in-hand and a week to fill however I wanted, I decided to take it on.

I thought I’d model my custom brackets on the old, slim ones. I started by checking to make sure that the hardware for the new shower bar fit in the old brackets. I took out a mounting screw and the pin that holds the rod in the bracket, and verified that they did indeed fit in the old ones, allowing me to use them as a template.

I’d struggled with Autodesk Fusion 360 previously and wasn’t enthusiastic about returning to it. However, given the precision I was after with this project, it seemed like the right tool for the job.

I started by tracing the curve of the arch, and did some googling for the math to calculate a radius given a partial arc.

A few YouTubes later, I actually had a good idea how to create a solid with the correct curvature in Fusion 360. However, I couldn’t get the front side of this part to round in the way I wanted, and rather than compromise on the look, I elected to take the escape hatch to Cinema4D.

I tried a few different techniques, ultimately opting for deleting all but the wall-adjacent side of the bracket, generating half a sphere, squashing and rotating it to fit the shape, and then stitching the two objects back together. Satisfied with my shape, I then imported it back into Fusion 360 to continue.

I then proceeded to methodically build the rest of the bracket, taking measurements off the old brackets with calipers. It started to come more easily; the mechanical thinking of the process is a bit more natural to me, and I started getting the hang of the tool. I was creating solids, filleting edges to round them, then creating other solids, and using those to cut voids out of the existing shape. After a few hours of learning and work, I had my bracket designed.

I opted to print in ABS, which I had gotten the hang of. So I exported my model, sliced, and printed.

At this point, I compared the print to my template, and noticed a problem – my holes, despite measuring them, were far too small. Turns out, when creating the holes, Fusion 360 was asking me for diameters, but I mistakenly through I needed to put in the radius, giving me holes that were half the appropriate size. Hilariously, I also had messed up in the other direction on the curvature of the back, giving me a curve that was not nearly sharp enough.

At this point, I discovered a feature of Fusion 360 that made me extremely happy that I’d chosen to use it. There is a “timeline” that allows me to rewind to previous operations, change aspects of that operation, such as the diameter of a cylinder that I’ve created, and then replay the following actions. I still had to go back into Cinema4D to create a new back with twice the amount of curve, but after that, making the adjustments to the model were easy.

When I printed the duct ring for my paint booth, I had exported an .obj from Fusion 360 and imported it into Cura, but I noticed that the curves on the resulting print were awfully faceted. It didn’t make a huge difference on that print, so I lived with it. However, I noticed the same faceting on the smooth, “programmatic” surfaced created by Fusion 360 on my first bracket attempt. I went digging and discovered that there was a “Make > 3D Print” menu that gave me controls for a higher level of “Refinement,” resulting in the smooth curves I was after.

Then it was time for another print, and this time, a successful hardware test-fit!

With that success in hand, I went ahead and printed the mirrored bracket for the other side.

From watching other makers on YouTube, I understood that the best way to smooth out print lines was alternating passes of paint and sanding.

It felt like time to mount the brackets. Drilling the holes in the arch felt like something I could really only do once, and I’ve had trouble with the drill wandering a bit in the past when drilling holes, so I started with a spring-loaded punch to give myself a good pilot, and then used a drill guide to make sure I was drilling square to the curve at each point.

... Until I tried to put the end of the shower rod into the holder I’d just mounted. Turns out, I had checked the pin and screws to make sure they matched, but I didn’t check the opening for the rod, and discovered that the end of the rod was a few millimeters wider. I double checked measurements of the brackets, and... yeah, that’s not gonna work. (27mm vs 29.5mm)

So, back to Fusion 360 one more time, to make the opening for the rod as wide it needed to be. I was concerned the spool of ABS was getting a bit low, so I broke out the kitchen scale to make sure I actually had enough to finish the prints. Then print, paint, sand, paint more, etc.

Since I was now pretty sure these were the final brackets, I took a moment to consider my paint choices. I had multiple paints that I thought might work, but matching the rod was challenging, and I ultimately opted for a contrasting “hammered metal” paint. I also did a finishing coat of enamel to seal and protect the paint from chipping.

Once everything had plenty of time to dry, I got everything put up and put together.

All told, I got back 5.5 inches of space in the shower. Not too bad.

And that was it! ... for now, as this project gave my more ideas for how to facelift the shower area with custom finishings. But more on that later.

Super quick infrastructure improvement!

I’ve been doing a lot of 3d printing lately with ABS, which means printing inside an enclosure, itself inside my paint booth. While it’s printing, I want to keep the enclosure closed to contain the ABS fumes, but that makes it hard to see the in-progress prints. Turns out, it’s dark in there.

I’ve been using my Cricut Bright 360 lamp to shine light in from the outside, but it tends to reflect off the plastic window of the enclosure, making visibility (and good photos) less-than-ideal.

The solution, I think, is some internal lighting.

I picked up some LED Strip Lights, and trimmed to the length I need.

The construction of the enclosure is quite simple, so I just peeled the outer fabric of the enclosure off to expose the top of the frame.

The strip lights came with adhesive, but that seems better suited for applying to flat surfaces—and besides, I like a solution that I can modify easily in the future. So, zip ties.

With enough tension on the zip ties, I’m actually able to position the LED strip pretty easily. The reflective coating of the interior also helps bounce the light around, illuminating the entire space effectively.

The lights came with a dimmer, which is convenient, because ironically the Ender screen is a bit hard to read with the light up all the way. However, the cords were a bit short, so I picked up some DC extension cables so that I could run the power out the side of the enclosure and have the dimmer accessible outside.

Quick and easy mod to my printer enclosure, and now I can see (and photograph) what’s going on inside much better. 10/10.

When we left off last, I’d finished the structure of my collapsible paint booth, but I was venting it out the window with a precarious, clearly-temporary rolled posterboard vent. It was flimsy, not waterproof, and honestly quite a pain to use.

Paint booth (part 1)

Painting outside has never seemed like a super viable proposition. My main workshop space is my basement, and I don’t have a ton of space. So I need a paint booth, and something portable and collapsible is clearly required.

MakingAdam Luptak

A tool that’s frustrating to use is a tool that I will tend to avoid using, so getting to a more permanent and user-friendly solution for venting became top priority.

I was looking for something basically like a dryer vent; a bit of ducting to connect the hose to and a hood to keep rainwater out of the opening. However, my tenuous grasp of fluid dynamics suggested that significantly narrowing the diameter of my vent would reduce its effectiveness, so I was looking for quite a large dryer vent; 10-inch diameter. Turns out that such things are a bit on the pricey side. I thought, I have a 3d printer, I can just fabricate what I need. If I’d realized then the effort I was about to undertake, maybe I would have reconsidered; but then, pragmatism is not always the reason for doing things oneself.

First thing was to select a material. Up til now, I’d been printing with PLA. However, the internet suggested that it might do poorly in heat and sunlight. PETG and ASA were recommended, but are a bit more expensive, and given that my vent wouldn’t be exposed to the elements all the time—just as needed—ABS felt like an acceptable cost-saving compromise.

I’d read that ABS could be difficult to work with, but I’d had good luck with 3d printing so far; how hard could it be?

Now, to model the pieces I needed. I figured I’d make a duct ring, and then a hood that could slide onto it, but could be disassembled again in the future.

I’d learned Cinema4D (C4D) in college, and past prints I had made were either aesthetic pieces that I’d modeled or models that I’d downloaded from the internet. Given that precision was more important for this kind of functional print, I figured it was time to start learning a more specialized CAD tool like Autodesk Fusion 360.

Reader, I hated it.

Really my own fault, because despite hearing that it was a difficult program to use, I figured I could get by; I had prior experience with 3d modeling, and I have been teaching myself software and figuring out interfaces pretty much my whole life. Fusion 360 was much less comprehensible than I’d expected, and I clearly overestimated my ability to figure it out on my own. Noticing a theme here?

After fumbling my way through for several painful hours, I finally had a model for my duct ring. I was also frustrated enough by the effort it had taken to achieve this simple part that I decided to pull the ripcord on Fusion 360 and fall back to C4D. Other than the slot that the duct ring would fit into, precision was not as important on the hood, so I figured I’d get away with it. Before that, however, I wanted to get the ring printing, which is when I hit another snag.

I had misremembered the printing area of my Ender 3 v2, so the ring could not be printed as a single piece. I was not touching Fusion 360 at this point, so I just imported the .obj into C4D and split it into thirds.

From there, I started printing, and... disaster.

Well, a very minor disaster. The print warped after a few layers, coming away from the build plate, snagged and ripped the silicone sock that surrounds the extruder, and the printer kept going, globbing up material around the extruder. Having seen photos of extruder disasters, I worried that I’d have to replace some significant parts, but in the end, after a little light disassembly, I determined the plastic hadn’t gotten into any delicate parts; I got the heating element back up to temperature, and was able to pull the plastic off entirely with tweezers. Then I just had to order some replacement silicone socks, and I was back in business.

Reading more about ABS printing online, I began eliminating the various common issues that could lead to improper build plate adhesion. I’ve been using a flexible PEI build plate, which should be very good for adhesion. However, going over all the details, I came to a conclusion—the ABS temperature presents in my slicer software, Ultimaker Cura, are garbage. In general, I’ve been quite happy with Cura, but the preset was heating the plate to 80°C. The internet recommended somewhere between 100°C and 120°C for proper adhesion. With my temperatures adjusted (I settled on 110°C as a compromise, which also happens to be the highest the bed temperature will go), and with a brim added to increase the adhesion surface area, I was ready to go once more.

Success! Well, until I tried to get the piece off the build plate.

It was on there good. I am used to being able to just pop my PLA parts off the flexible plate, but this was not budging. I tried to pry it off with a scraper, and ended up ripping the PEI coating off the metal plate rather than releasing the ABS from it. Oh well, the build plate is a “consumable” anyway. I finally tried warming the plate back up, and despite being quite hot to the touch (gloves recommended), the print finally came right off.

So, I ordered another PEI build plate, and a few days later I was able to print the other two pieces without incident.

After some reading about different glues for ABS, I settled on epoxy. I’d originally thought that I could clamp these pieces together while the epoxy cured, but it turns out clamping semicircles together is really challenging. I eventually chose instead to drill some small holes and zip tie the pieces together to maintain their shape. For each joint, I cut the zip tie with nippers, applied epoxy with a brush, and then re- zip tied it back together. Once all three joints were epoxied, I figured there was no reason not to leave the zip ties, so I just trimmed the tails and left them for extra strength.

Now to clean up the rough hole I made last time, this time using an old hand-me-down jigsaw that my dad gave me over the holidays.

Alright, back to modeling the hood.

I loaded the .obj of the duct ring into C4D and started modeling around it. I was able to work out the unit conversion to know how big certain dimensions would be—I had a cheap caliper on-hand for the modeling of both pieces to help me judge thicknesses—but a lot of the work was just based on modeling in relationship to the duct ring. I started from a “tube” primitive, spanning 180° and matching the size and subdivision level I wanted.

I then constructed a simple hood structure with splines and a loft, connected the pieces, and used a “bool” object to cut a slot for the ring using the very same model of the duct ring.

After preparing this top section, I cut the model in half so that it would fit on the print bed, then extruded the bottom edge straight down so it would slide straight on and protect against angled rainfall.

I intentionally chose an angle for the hood that could be printed unsupported, but I was still a little bit concerned about the strain it might put on the adhesion surface during printing, and it did seem important to lightly support the slot. Rather than generating supports with Cura, I chose to model my own minimal supports that I could cut out later.

Having gotten my settings dialed in, the print went smoothly, despite being a pretty long one—over 15 hours per piece, even at low quality (for speed).

The vertical hood supports snapped off quite easily; I don’t know if they actually provided any strain relief, but nothing went wrong here so I chose not to jinx it. I started trimming the supports from the slot using a pair of nippers. Unfortunately, the stress on the piece from the nippers started creating small splits in the piece—the low quality setting seems a bit more prone to splitting. I switched to my Dremel to cut the supports instead.

After trimming the supports out, I did a test fit of this half onto the duct ring... and the already-cracked piece started to split completely. Reflecting on it, I didn’t actually leave myself any tolerance when I modeled the slot in C4D, and with thermal expansion from printing, there’s no way it was going to fit.

So, back to Cinema4D, rinse & repeat. Pretty straightforward to enlarge the slot a bit, then print again.

My slot supports were perhaps a little too minimal, so there were some strands of drooping material, but aesthetics aren’t important here. Just more to trim with the Dremel.

And would you look at that! It fits!

With that success, time to print the other half, trim it up, and epoxy it together.

Once the epoxy had cured, I fit it onto the duct ring... and the epoxied seam cracked apart. In the end, I used the Dremel to clean up the slot a bit more, applied more epoxy (including to a split that opened up on one half of the hood), and reinforced with both zip ties and some Gorilla tape on the inside. Not winning any style points, but totally functional.

Then it was time to put it all together. A hose clamp seemed like the best way to connect the hose to the duct ring. I don’t have any single hose clamps big enough, so I just connected a few smaller ones together—like zip ties, they are very easy to chain together.

I had also been finding it tricky to get the whole piece in and out of the window, so I picked up some handles for it. I drilled holes and used pop rivets to attach them to the board, and then slid the hood into place.

I finally tested it out, and was incredibly underwhelmed by the amount of air coming out of the vent. I discovered that a significant amount of air was actually leaking out between the blower and the hose—the hose had a built-in drawstring that I’d used to connect it to the blower, but it was woefully insufficient at maintaining a decent seal. Leaking all that air back into the workshop defeats the purpose of the venting system—I needed to actually move all that air out.

More hose clamps!

I also used a few cup hooks and old metal clothes hangers that I had lying around to better hang the hose, minimizing sharp bends on the way to the window. I bent the clothes hangers to fit and passed them through smaller rings on the duct hose, making itvery easy to attach to the hooks when setting up and then detach when I'm finished.

Finally, the rivets didn’t actually open up terribly well, and one pulled out after a bit of handling. So I forced the rest of the rivets back through the board, drilled them out of the handle with the drill press, and then reattached the handles with machine screws and nuts, which is feeling much more secure.

After all those ups-and-downs, it works! Getting really great airflow now, drawing air from the paint booth and moving it effectively outside into the window well.

All in all, it was a much bigger and more involved process than I expected at the outset. Despite the aesthetic crunchiness, I am thrilled with how it turned out. I’ve now got a reliable, sturdy venting system, which is quick and easy for me to set up and take down, and moves air very nicely. After all this work, it was great to get into some painting. But that will be another post!

We got quite a big early-April snowstorm here in Utah, and I came outside to discover that something or someone—perhaps a plow—had hit my mailbox hard enough to snap the mounting board off of the post.

(As an aside, this is not the mailbox I want, but perhaps the mailbox I deserve. The mailbox I actually want is sitting in my workshop, an unfinished project that stalled out after ballooning in scope and then hitting significant setbacks. But that's a whole different post.)

Anyhow, this called for a quick repair, so that I could actually receive mail the next day.

Fortunately, I had a 4x4 bracket laying around that seemed like it could secure things nicely. I broke out the Dremel and started cutting away just enough of the surviving mounting board to fit the bracket.

From there, it was straightforward to drill some quick holes and secure the bracket into place with nuts and machine screws.

After removing the broken bit of mounting board that was still screwed into the post, it was a nice pressure-fit for the bracket onto the post, and secured with two screws.

And that's it! A nice quick repair, but it's now feeling even more secure than it did before. Counting it as a win.

Time to actually get serious about painting.

Painting outside has never seemed like a super viable proposition. For one thing, the weather in Utah is... not good for painting for a significant part of the year. And when it's not too cold, there's dust or pollen or just crap blowing around in the air. Which leaves me painting inside, which has... some obvious drawbacks.

My main workshop space is my basement. I've actually done a number of quick spraypaint jobs over the years, and I feel like I've done a pretty good job protecting myself with a half-decent respirator. However, our HVAC is also in the basement. It's an inescapable fact that if I do any significant amount of spraying, it starts getting sucked into the HVAC and gets pretty fume-y upstairs. Not great.

I also don't have a ton of space. Now, this is partly my own fault; the basement is also storage space, and I'm neither the most organized nor the quickest to throw things out. Clutter aside, it's still not that much space (I say, recognizing that my friends with NYC apartments would kill for this much basement workshop square footage). This is all to say that I don't have the space for a dedicated painting area, so something portable and collapsible is clearly required.

There is, however, a nice window well in a good spot in my main workspace, so that is going to be my best bet for venting paint fumes out of the house.

How to make a DIY Paint Booth | I Like To Make Stuff

Make a DIY paint booth that can fold up for storage!Sponsored by Casperhttp://casper.com/makeDIY Tyler’s paint booth video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf...

YouTube

In doing a little research into paint booths, I came across this video of Bob from I Like To Make Stuff building a collapsible paint booth. His design almost perfectly fit my needs, except that it is just using a box fan to pull air through a filter, but doesn't vent outside. However, helpfully he built a permanent, ventilated paint booth a few years later, and that gave me enough idea about making my own modifications.

An important part of this equation for me is going to be the blower that pulls the air out of the paintbooth and then vents it out the window. It took a bit of looking to find something that would work for me. Bob cautioned in his video that you don't want explosive vapors being drawn over a normal motor. He solved with a blower that had the motor outside of the housing, but I ended up picking up an "explosion-proof" blower that is specially designed to be safe for flammable vapors. A buddy of mine with a bit of experience in this area suggested that this was overkill, but this setup is in the basement of my house—I think I'm justified in being cautious here.

I picked up some white tile board to serve as the main structure of the booth. I worked out a size that would fit nicely on top of my table, and can operate either vertically or horizontally.

Cutting was a little bit of a challenge. Really feeling the lack of a table saw here. Instead I had to do most of my cuts using a circular saw, and trying out a Kreg Rip-Cut Guide. The guide allowed me to make repeatable cuts fairly easily without as much resetting as I'd need with a standard guide rail, but it certainly wasn't perfect—the board has a quite a bit of flex in it, and cutting it by myself was tricky. The final inch or two of each cut was particularly hard to keep straight, but close enough for these purposes. Some of the shorter cuts I was able to use the miter saw, which was a nice luxury after the long circular saw cuts.

The center panel needs ventilation cut into it, where the blower will sit and pull air through. It's placed in a corner, so that it's positioned correctly for the blower to sit on the table in either horizontal or vertical configuration. I'll be using a cheap air filter to catch particulates, and rightly or wrongly, I felt the need to leave some structure in front of the filter. I planned to use a hole saw to cut a grid of holes to allow air to pass through, but I needed to work out what size hole and how to space them out.

Trying to reason it out in my head was breaking my brain, so instead I reached for a design tool to work it out visually. I loaded up Figma, which is generally more of an interface design tool, but it was simple to use to visualize what I was trying to accomplish, treating 1 inch as 100 pixels. I quickly worked out how I could lay out 2in. holes in a grid with the correct spacing.

From there, it was trivial to measure and mark the board, hole punch the center points for each hole, and then use the hole saw to cut.

Some further testing might be required, because I'm now a little worried that I've left too much material in front of the air filter, and that I'm perhaps impeding the flow of air too much.

Still primarily following Bob's design, I've cut strips of a sturdy outdoor fabric for each of the joints. They're affixed to the board using Super 77 spray adhesive, and then taped along the edges with Gorilla duct tape.

To finish off the booth structure, some side support pieces and some heavy duty stick-on velcro.

So that's the box! And it folds up quite nicely.

Lastly, to attach the filter. I need a way to make sure that air is only passing through the blower, and not leaking out into the rest of the room. I might do something with the tile board eventually, but to get up and running, cardboard seemed the place to start.

Very important to seal up the edges with tape. My grasp of fluid mechanics is very basic, but I think it's vital to make sure air isn't leaking around this filter setup, and air is pulling straight through from the booth, through the filter, and straight out the blower without anywhere else to go.

Now, how about actually venting out the window? I cut a piece of board to fit in the window... and then realized I didn't actually have a good way to cut the hole to vent out of.

As a first pass, I used my largest hole saw to knock out as much as I could and then roughed out the rest of the hole.

This will need cleaned up, but it's a place to start.

I want a more solid, weatherproof, permanent ducting setup, but I could actually put the booth to use in getting there. As a temporary stop-gap, I've taped together and rolled up some posterboard, which will do for the time being.

Hooray! My first pass at my collapsible paint booth. And it works!

In order to get this setup more finalized, I need some better ducting hardware. This brings into focus my other reason for wanting to build this booth, and a feature of how I've sized it: I can fit my 3d printer inside it, in its enclosure, for printing materials that could use ventilation.

So. More work to do to clean up the venting situation, but this is a great start. Part 2 coming soon!

I've been thinking about model building for a while.

I'm very into the aesthetics of Star Wars. I've actually had a model kit for a U-Wing at home for an embarrassingly long time. When I finally opened it up, I discovered it's not much of a build project – it's very simple and looks like it'll only take 30 minutes or so to put together.

The problem is, it came pre-painted, and it's just too clean. Star Wars ships just shouldn't be clean.

So it's a painting project. Trouble is, I'm not a very experienced painter, and it's an intimidating project, working at that scale.

I might have a perfectionist streak to get over here.

But I've been thinking that I need something else to build my skills; perhaps something a bit bigger or more forgiving.

Which brings me to BD-1. I picked up a Ender 3 v2 earlier this year, and I've been idly looking at different models I could print and build. A few weeks back, I decided to pull the trigger on this BD-1 model from FationP3D on Etsy.

Maybe I'm crazy, but painting something that I've 3D printed somehow lowers the pressure – like, if I royally screw something up, worst-case I can just re-print a part. And there's just lots of great detail there to play with.

The model consists of 37 unique .stl files, several of which are duplicated 2x or 4x. I laid out the files into a series of 10 prints to minimize the number of resets between prints.

And then I started printing, and printing, and printing.

Huh. I guess this guy is going to be life-size.

In the end, I ran the printer more or less around-the-clock for just over 3 weeks, printing 11 total setups and going through about a full spindle of PLA filament.

Mercifully few print failures. When printing the biggest piece, the main section of BD's head, I was quite worried that I'd run out of filament mid-print, but the 4+ day print finished successfully with a little left on the spindle. At one point I killed the power to the printer by tripping the breaker (3D printer, space heater, and shop vac on the same circuit), and although the printer was able to resume the print when I restored power, it ran for another 24 hours but eventually stopped without properly finishing the print. And then there was this spectacular failure:

I need to spend some time sorting out the pieces now, and I've got some supports to trim off a few pieces. My original plan was to simply print and paint, but my friend Jamie has raised my ambitions and now has me thinking about some electronics as well.

So, some cleanup and knolling next, I think. Lots of painting, but I've got some infrastructure work to do to enable that. And we'll see where it takes me; I expect to be at this for a little while.

This is Making, my new blog to document my various making endeavors.

It seems a truism that the grass is always greener. Having a career in digital work, I have long been enamored with making things with my hands. At various stages of my life, I've had some exposure to a fair share of techniques and disciplines – woodworking in my father's basement wood shop, metalworking shop class in junior high, and a handful of college electives, including glass work, jewelry metalwork, and woodworking. Since college, however, my creative life has primarily been lived on screens.

This changed to some degree in late 2015, when we bought our first home. A top priority after moving was building a fence to keep our dogs secured in the backyard.

In the intervening years, I've had a bunch of opportunities for DIY work (including building more fences with my dad, as the existing, aging wood fences couldn't always hold up to Utah windstorms).

The DIY work picked up speed in 2020 with the pandemic. Being home all the time gave me the time, and the impetus, to tackle things that I'd been putting off or simply came up..

Don't get me wrong, house projects are gratifying, but they don't always scratch that creative itch.

So I've been thinking about more creative pursuits for some time. Far too long, honestly – a friend once opined that if you've been meaning to do a thing for a long enough time and haven't done it, you're probably not going to. So, in some way this year I've begun to prove him wrong. I've been dreaming up projects but not starting them for years and years. I've been following maker YouTubers (primarily Adam Savage / Tested, Simone Giertz, and more recently Laura Kampf). But it's time to get busy and be a little more intentional.

What do I expect to post here? There are a few projects I have underway, so there will be updates on those. I picked up a 3D printer a few months ago (perhaps the impetus for finally beginning). So, expect 3D printing, model-building, maybe painting. I would expect to see infrastructure work from time to time. And I'm sure I will still have home DIY projects from time to time.

I don't particularly expect a large readership, but if you are reading this, well, thanks! You can subscribe if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published.