Every shop needs a good workbench and its about time I built myself one. I sourced most of the parts locally from the $75 solid maple butcher block top to the $40 shelves with drawers I got at a local salvage yard. The only things I bought new were the three Rockler vises which I have yet to install. The picture above is of everything all mocked up.

I have assembled the bottom section out of 4×4’s and 2×4’s secured with long galvanized deck screws. The base frame itself is 45″ long and 23″ deep. The butcher block will overhang 3″ on the front and back, and 12″ and 18″ respectively on the left and right. This will accommodate the vice setup I will be installing but I will post more on that when its complete. For now, you can see more pictures by clicking on the image above.

This week my father flew to San Francisco to help me, and teach me, to build a banister and repair a staircase. We tore down the wall that used to be there, replaced all the treads, and put in a matching banister and railing that we copied from the upstairs banister. For the past five days of the build I have been blogging over on SanFranVic.com where you can follow the story and see all the photos.

Since space is always at a premium, especially in my kitchen, its important to use every inch as best as possible. Instead of having two separate trash bins it made more sense to combine them into one piece of furniture and gain table top space. So I searched the internet to find something that would fit but unfortunately nothing came up. So it was off to the shop to solve the problem.

With the help of my roommate, we built this trash and recycling center out of maple plywood using simple dowel joinery. We finished it in a cabernet color and added some simple hardware like magnetic latches and handles from our local hardware store. All in all the project only took a few hours total and solved a big problem.

My long time friend Caroline and her fiance Regan asked my housemate Brian and I to do the lighting for their wedding because they had seen our renovation work on sanfranvic.com. We were both honored and excited to help out. Not only did it save them thousands of dollars from hiring a lighting expert it allowed us to give them something they will always remember.

The light array was pretty simple and only took a few hours to setup. We hung up five strands of 32 foot strings of ping pong ball lights from the reception house to a rope 10 feet up that we ran parallel to the house. That rope was held up by two pieces of 10′ galvanized steel conduit that was anchored to the ground with a few pieces of rope and some stakes. The hard part was just getting the lights up and taught so they were high above everyones head. I’m happy to say that even after the storm that came through they still stayed up and everything went off without a hitch.

I’d like to thank Caroline and Regan for having me and I was honored to be a part of your wedding. I was happy to help and even happier to give you a present that you’ll always remember and cant be returned. It was a great time and something I wont soon forget.

Its always been my dream to have an automated house and the first step is hardwired Ethernet. Whether you are going to be running video over Ethernet, VoIP, or just the good old Internet you really just cant beat copper. Although wireless has come a long way since 802.11b it will just never keep up. Besides the fact that copper performs flawlessly and extremely fast, there are no reliability issues that you inevitably run into while using on WiFi. If anyone out there reading has found a perfect WiFi Access Point that can run at gigabit speeds for hours at a time with 5 - 10 devices on it please let me know. It would have saved me a lot of trouble!

For the full writeup with tons of pictures please see my post Wiring For High Speed Ethernet on San Fran Vic.

In true geek blogging obsession/narcissism, I have decided to blog the restoration of my 1890 San Francisco Victorian home at www.sanfranvic.com. Its going to be a long journey and I’ve decided to document it for my friends, family, and any future owner of the house.

It should be interesting to learn what goes into an old house like this one, where it came from, and where its going. Although I have a lot of experience engineering and building many many things, this is my first home restoration. So follow along with me, learn from my mistakes, and try not to yourself like I am going to. Enjoy!

One of the most simple and useful things I have made in my shop so far is this crosscutting jig. It is perfect for when your chop saw just doesn’t reach far enough to cut a big piece of wood. Also, I have much nicer blades for my table saw then I do for my chop saw. Either way, it is a quintessential jig to have in your shop.

I made this one with some scrap wood I had lying around the shop in a matter of an hour or so. The base is made from birch veneered plywood and the rails are made from oak. I bought the T-tracks to guide the sled from Rockler, my new favorite store. Other than that, there’s not much to it. I decided to use dowels to hold it all together but screws or any other type of joinery would work just as well.

The most important part is getting it square obviously. What I did was made the base perfectly square, measured the distance between the tracks on my saw, then attached the tracks to the sled. Then I clamped the jig the saw, turned on the blade and raised it up through the wood. Now with my T-square I am able to line up the pieces that hold the wood perpendicular to the blade. Thats all there is to it. This design is very simple and straightforward but if you browse around the web you will find all sort of different designs, additions, and safety additions.

(More pictures can be found in this Flickr set)

For years I have been trying to create a Media Center to attach my TV. I’ve tried Windows Media Center years ago, Myth TV on Linux, and everything in between. Nothing was simple, cheap, and easy to setup. I have friends who have tried those off the shelf media boxes like the ones from Netgear and the likes, but those have their pitfalls too. I wanted something open source, truly hackable, and preferably something Unix/Linux based. Thats why I turned to the Apple TV.

For my use case, I did not care about disk storage. I am using my Apple TV’s as terminals or endpoints to play media from storage somewhere else on the network. This allowed me to buy the cheap version of the Apple TV with a 40 GB drive for about $220. Not only that, there is a Toslink (optical) out that I will be attaching to a DAC and set of vintage tubes for crisp beautiful sound. For that kinda money, its pretty hard to beat the Apple TV.

Once in my possession, I immediately hacked it to expand its functionality. Without it, the Apple TV is actually pretty restricted and an overall weak product; however, Boxee helps make it all better. Boxee allows you to watch all those formats that iTunes does not support, like DivX, etc. Not only that, it allows you watch Hulu as well as other online video services.

Hacking your Apple TV and Installing Boxee

There’s actually nothing to do really and I would barely consider it hacking. A few folks out there have made it quite easy. In a nutshell, all you need to do is create a ‘patchstick’ on your PC using a thumb drive you have laying around. You insert it into your Apple TV’s USB drive, restart it, and voila! It installs itself and you’re all set. You can get the USB Patch Stick creator from the Google code repository.

If you’re house is even half as old as mine is, its likely that you have similar sash and weight style windows. You know, the ones that are cold, drafty and often times have snapped ropes? Luckily, they are pretty simple to work on for the average do-it-yourselfer. Eventually I am going to replace the weights with spring balances and insulate but for now they just needed to be done. Another person helps but this definitely could be done on your own. These windows usually arent too heavy. There is plenty of information and how-to’s out there on YouTube and and This Old House’s web site.

In my case, I needed to duplicate some weight pocket doors because I was missing a set. This unfortunately is a little more advanced but anyone with some table saw skills can make these. All you need is a miter and some scrap wood. More pictures and descriptions can be found on my flikr page.

When my housemate and I moved into our new place we weren’t thrilled with the victorian-style knockoff chandelier that was in our living room. Our friend recommended we paint it and see if we still wanted to throw it out. So, I took the idea and ran with it. Needless to say, it’s definitely not getting thrown out any time soon. Here is a picture of the finished product.

This was a pretty simple project and started out with a beat up old chandelier. I took it down and cleaned it off as best I could with soap and water. Then I sprayed it with some white primer before hitting it with two coats of high gloss orange. That was the easy part and didnt take too long.

Next I had to track down some small lamp shade covers. I came across a nice set of 8 at lampsplus.com. First thing I did when I got them was template. This was crucial in cutting out 5 copies from the fabric. I simply wrapped a big enough piece of paper around the lamp shade and taped it. Then I trimmed up all the excess and unwrapped it. Voila template.

(click the image to see it larger)

After all of the fabric was cut out it was time to warm up the glue gun. Make sure to try and line up the fabric seam with the seam thats already on the lamp shade. First I glued one side down where I wanted it, then I would take out all the slack and wrinkles and fold the over the other side. Dont worry about making this perfect. Once you fold over the top and button around the lamp shade rim you can deal with the rest of the slack.

(click the image to see it larger)

And thats it! There’s not much to it and it didnt take long. I was able to save an old chandelier from the dump and go something completely original in return. There are more pictures up on Flickr including one of the completed room.