10 Min Hack #9

Its 1300 on a Sunday afternoon and your after a 0 ring to suit a Victa 2 stroke lawn mower.
You've got to be kidding right?
Your serious.
Christ.

So walking around the hardware store looking (and not finding) a oring with a ID of 28mm i came across giant orings to suit a toilet.
Hmmmm
I wonder.

 Thinking about the different ways i could cut this, knife, scissors, drill, teeth.
Cutting it may work, but i'm crap at cutting circles with any accuracy. So i went with plan b.

  I sandwiched it between 2 bit plywood after lining up the center of the oring with the middle hole.

Drilled out the center with a fornster bit, then the outside with a hole saw.

Winning.
Back to mowing the lawns.
Till next time.
Al.

Sanding Cart

I've had a belt / disc sander for a couple of years and it's been placed on random flat surfaces around my shed. A couple of months ago i bought a oscillating spindle sander and that triggered this build. Can't have two homeless machines! As per the other carts I've made, this one is constructed with pine and plywood. Nothing special to mention about the build, butt joints for the pine and pocket holes for the plywood.

The finished cart.
Notable features include.
- 10W LED floodlight on a movable arm (re-purposed from an old ventilator)
- Intergrated dust extraction. I just need to connect one 10mm hose to the side of the cart to get dust extraction for all machines.
- LED strip lightening for the interior of the cart.
- Velcro on the side for spare sanding discs to stick to.
- Integrated power-board, only need to connect one plug to power to get power to all machines and lights.

I carefully considered the placement of the machines to allow for as small top as possible. Which for the most part worked, until i tried to change the sanding belt and found this task was impossible as some genius had put a spindle sander in the damn way! So back to the drawing board for a solution.

Which ended up mounting the spindle sander to a board adding some hinges and a piece of scrap steel to support it when its in the up position. This machine only weights 13kg and in the up position its right on its balance point negating the need for any additional support. The other machine weighs about 30kg, hence why I choose the spindle sander to tilt.

There is normally a cover over this area. Starting on the left is 2.5" dust port for the disc sander, 4 port power board, LED power supply, another 2 x 2.5" dust ports and finally on the right a 100mm dust port.

Aside from the hiccup with machine placement, this project went well and is very functional. And like everything else in my shed it's on wheels. I'll probably add shelves and doors to the bottom at some stage, once i worked out what to put in there.

Till next time.

Al

Shop VAC mk III

So this shop vac has gone through a number of changes over it's life and i think this may it's last (who am i kidding as if this is going to be the last) I'm up to round three in collection containers post cyclone. The reason? Too much suction! It keeps crushing the plastic buckets / bins I've tried. So a permanent solution was in order. In the form of a really thick cardboard tube. The other thing that needed to be addressed was its size, it needed to have a smaller footprint.

So construction commenced. The running design was vertical in nature, so i added bricks to the base to promote stability. (I later regretted this when the entire weight of the setup landed on my foot!) All the materials used for this build are reclaimed / re-purposed with the exception of the four main posts.

The base complete. I intentionally left the pallet markings on the wood as i think its looks kinda cool. You don't? I don't care, it's happening.

Cutting the cyclone intake from the lid. It amazes me how much can be done with a 10 volt drill! Ideally this procedure should be done at the drill press but the lid wouldn't fit there. And i ignored my inner pat's demand to use a corded drill and used the cordless drill.

To make it easier to service the shopvac filter i installed draw slides so now the vac slides out when i need it to.

And the finished product! Finished with 2 coats of wipe on poly. The god awefull block next to the cyclone allows for the unit to be pulled by the vac hose without ripping the cyclone off the lid and thanks to the bricks doesn't tip over. All in all i think it was a win. Container no long collapses and takes up less floor space. Oh and the container is massive! Hopefully only requiring quarterly emptying.

Till next time.

Al.