My wife and I love coffee. And not just “good” coffee… I’ll drink any kind of coffee. It doesn’t have to be grown in the Himalayas to make me happy. French press, Starbucks, Keurig’s, percolator over a campfire… I don’t care. So in our quest to learn how to make good coffee at home (because it’s WAY cheaper to do so), we end up stocking up on a lot of coffee beans and bags and containers. This little project was a way to organize all that next to our coffee …
LED Closet Lighting
When we moved into our house a few years ago, none of the storage closets had any lights. That makes finding things in there very hard, and I’m already bad at looking for stuff. So I decided these closets needed lights. I wanted something that would turn on automatically when you open the door, disperse light around the closet evenly and not just in the top, and wouldn’t take too much energy to run if the door was left open by accident. So here’s what I came up with. Its …
Salt Lamp
Well I figured since the last few tutorials were kinda hard, it was time to do a simple LED project that I think might be an easier starting project for electronics. This project is a simple switch from an old, incandescent bulb to a new, efficient LED strip. This project is based on a pink salt lamp, which the internet generally refers to as a “Himalayan Salt Lamp”, but mine is technically from a salt mine in Germany, so I don’t think I can call it Himalayan. I got this lamp years …
Fountain and Pond Design
I’ve always been fascinated with ponds but a huge, in-ground pond wouldn’t fit or work well with our simple backyard landscaping, so I came up with the idea of adding a pond in the middle of our raised beds with the same look and layout to complement them. Hence the stained wood frame. Building a pond is not really that difficult, but it does require a good part of a Saturday and quite a bit of digging. It doesn’t look deep in the picture, but it goes down below ground …
Sunbeam Flashlight
I’ve been wanting a slightly more powerful flashlight for a while now. I’ve got some brothers-in-law that have built their own flashlights and they are crazy bright and crazy small. I also wanted it to be inexpensive, so mine definitely didn’t end up being small. Its 18″ long and weighs about 2lbs. But it is CRAZY bright. Like it puts my car headlights to shame. Total cost for me was about $25, but I had some parts lying around. (metal grates, screws, wire, superglue, battery) You’ll need some tools to …
Notification Board
So my wife and I share a google calendar, and she does a pretty good job of putting things on there that we have scheduled to do, but my main problem with the system is that I forget to look at the calendar app in the mornings and am generally reminded about an event when its time to go. So I needed something that could help me stay on top of our calendar without putting in more effort than the bare minimum to do so. So I did a project …
Side Burner Alcohol Camping Stove Build
A couple weeks ago, we went camping with some friends. Which is my jam. But in the interest of not spending all our money on cool camping gear, I decided I wanted to try my hand at building a small alcohol stove. I did a lot of research on which types of stoves are best and there are a lot of pro’s and con’s for each type, but in the end I settled on a basic sideburner design. This stove can burn denatured alcohol (ethanol), HEET, and pure rubbing …