Adventures in DIY – Page 5

Digital Caliper Power Cable

January 13, 2020 by Adam@SheekGeek

The worse thing about digital calipers are those stupid-small batteries that don’t last 5 minutes and don’t stay in too well. Sometimes you lose the battery cover then you’re really screwed. To find a workable solution to this issue, I googles and saw a bunch of 3D printed solutions for data cables on these calipers. I decided that I didn’t care much for the data part, but to 3D print a connector just for this seemed a waste of time. Sure, you can find some Dupont connectors to 3D print, but is it worth it? I set about a different way.

I happen to have a large number of servo connector cables from my quadcopters days. It just so happens that one of these female 3-pin dupont connectors fit perfectly in the caliper’s data slot. And if you used male wires, bent them backwards and shoved them in the data connector slot, it holds tight and provides a great connection for the power rails.

First, get a stabby thing and take the dupont connectors off some single-wire connectors (red and black are a good choice for colors).

Take out all 3 female connectors form a servo cable and shove the male wires on the two ends of the servo connector as shown. Next you want to be careful and bend the male wires around the edge. You have to make sure your orientation is correct for the pins as they need to line up red with the (+) terminal and black with the Gnd otherwise you’ll be making a new cable—ask me how I know… I did this in 2 stages since the pins are fragile. I slowly bent them against a tabletop to 90 degrees. Assessed their quality and angles and bent the remaining excess to 180 degrees

When done you should have something that looks like this:

Plug it into the data port and you should have good connectivity with the power rails. It is a tight interference fit.

I’ve considered adding this to a AAA or AAAA battery pack I could mount on top or the back of the calipers. I’m pretty busy so that might not happen. If it does, I’ll post my janky design here though.

Simple Tissue Box DIY Christmas Presents

November 18, 2019 by Adam@SheekGeek

Each year, Jess and I make crafts as Christmas gifts for family members. This year, our first idea was too hard (as is typical) but we had another project we had wanted to do as well that worked out great!.

Firstly, we got some wooden Tissue Box covers.

The next step was to get a gel stain. We reused the same stain we used for our ukulele project which goes a long way.

We then used our KNK Zing vinyl cutter to cut a vinyl sticker Jess designed as a template to help up print a design on the boxes. We placed our clear transfer paper on the box and drew the outside dimensions to help us align the design.

When placing this on the actual box, it helps to hold it up to the light so you can see the edge of the box well.

When we ran out of large pieces, we cut the designs on scrap vinyl and pieced it together on the transfer paper. Here’s an example:

Once we had all the templates set up. We removed the clear transfer vinyl and used a dark gel stain and a foam brush to blot the stencil.

This was left for about an hour to dry until tacky and then we removed the stencils.

We then left the stain to dry completely overnight.

We finished the boxes with a light coat of white gel stain. The trick is to paint it on with the foam brush, then wipe off excess with a nice paper towel (This brand of paper towels are best for these kinds of crafts as they don’t leave any fuzzy mess behind). Do this technique to all sides of the box, even if they don’t have a stain design. This gives a rustic whitewashed look that still shows the figure in the wood a bit and evens out the design overall, making it look completely finished and cohesive.

Wipe on:

and wipe off:

Telescope Counterweights

November 21, 2020October 14, 2019 by Adam@SheekGeek

For some time now I’ve been interested in astrophotography, but my camera hanging off the back of my scope was too heavy for the clutch. The camera just weighted everything down. The solution is to add weights to the tube. You can buy a super expensive kit, but why do that when you can slap together a junky version yourself for much cheaper?

I ordered 24” of Mini T-track which can fit a 1/4” bolt head. When it arrived, I measured (by eye) the mini t-track against the side of my scope. I cut it leaving a short piece (which will be used later) and the actual weight section. I marked the two holes where the screws on the tube were. These are the screws that will hold the t-track to the tube. I actually drilled with two bits. One just the right size for the screws to pass through, and then I used another larger bit to remove the material from the top of the T-track and countersink the screws a bit. What isn’t shown below is a larger hole made in the top of the T-track so that I can easily add or remove weights without having to take the track off the tube.

I unscrewed the two bolts from my scope tube along the bottom. The whole time praying I don’t get any nasties in the tube during this escapade…

As for the weights, I used some 2” long 1/4” bolts and a 100 pack of 1.5” fender washers as weights.

I honestly didn’t count or measure the weights out, I just made a couple larger stacks of washers and a couple shorter ones. I used standard 1/4″ nuts as lock nuts to hold them on, though I wish I would have sprung for a cheap T-track knob set like this one which would make them easier to move around with one hand while I’m aiming and wrestling with the scope..

That little left-over piece of T track was great for a top-mount for a camera. I drilled a hole in the middle for the tube screw and added a great little folding tilt mount for a camera.

I used a really short 1” long 1/4” bolt to mount it.

Now I can put a camera on top as well as having a camera at prime focus of the scope. This can be used as a guide camera with a tracking program like PHD2 or another DSLR to take some additional wider-angled and less zoomed pics.

UPDATE: to make the weights not look so janky, I added thumbknobs and 3d printed black plastic sleeves for them. You can find the 3d printer files here to make them yourself.

Adding USB Power Ports for TV Accessories

September 16, 2019 by Adam@SheekGeek

The number of USB-powered devices around my TV has drastically increased over the last few years. With a Roku, Google Chromecast (requiring external power) and an amazon Echo dot or google home, and even sometimes to charge a phone, I felt like the wires were a mass of black spaghetti in my TV area. To fix this, I decided to replace the power outlet with one that incorporates USB power. I was sure to get one rated for as many amps on the output as possible to future-proof the whole setup and also to quick-charge my phone if I needed to.

The tools used were a small ratchet screwdriver set (not pictured), l, Wire Strippers/cutters (these from HanLong tools are the best I’ve ever used) and a non-contact AC voltage detector. If you can’t find the screwdriver set, just make sure you get a flathead and a phillips head screwdriver.

The first step is to turn power off at the breaker box! To check that you turned off the correct breaker, use the AC voltage detector by simply inserting it into each plug of the receptacle. If it flashed red and blinks repeatedly, then you didn’t turn off the right breaker. This is an important test because many time breaker boxes are labeled correctly, or for some reason the builder wired some lights or sockets to other breakers but never noted it on the breaker box.

Once the power is turned off, remove the front plate of the current outlet with a flat-head screwdriver. Why the hell they chose to make this a flathead screw, which can easily slip and cause you to jam your screwdriver into the outlet alludes me. That’s just bad design! Then you can use the phillips-head screwdriver to remove the outlet by unscrewing the screws at the top and bottom of the outlet.

Pull out the old outlet and I had to cut off the wires. Inside this box should be 3 colors of wire. The bare copper is the ground wire. That safely handles the power in case of a short circuit, shunting it to ground. Then you should have a white wire which is considered “Neutral” and either a Red or Black wire. Sometimes you’ll have both red and black wires. These two are the “Hot” wires. what you may not know is that the white Neutral and ground wires are connected together at the breaker box, but the red and black wires are two phases of 120v each. They use these together in multiple areas of a house such as a ceiling fan where one wall switch controls the light and the other controls the fan, or to wire things like your oven or dryer which needs 220v. The first thing to do is always wire the ground wire up. There’s no hard and fast rule about it, but it’s the order I like to do things. In this case you simply use a straight end of the ground wire and clamp it behind the brass plate where the green screw is on the outlet. The green screw on this kind of stuff is always ground.

Then move on to the actual power wires. In our case, I had what looked like 4 white wires. I pulled them out of the box a bit so I could see what was going on. The painters had been messy and painted the black wires white. I scraped a little paint off and then wired them up. You can follow the instructions on your new outlet for how to do this. In my case, I stripped about 1/2” of the insulation of the solid core wire, pushed it into the appropriate holes (labeled “hot” and “neutral” on the outlet) and screwed in the screws on the sides to clamp these wires in place. If you have both red and black wires in your box, do not wire them both to “hot” like I have. You need to read instructions for your particular outlet to see what to do with those. You may be able to just terminate one of these with a wire twist cap and electrical tape. I’m not sure what the building code says about that.

Once you are done, carefully shove all the wires back into the box and screw the box into place. This outlet is a bit bigger than the original one I had, so I had to fiddle with the ground wire connectors and wires to fit it all in the box. Once the outlet is secure, put the new faceplate on and you

are ready to turn the breaker back on and test it.

You can see the before and the after results of how this can clear up the mess of wires visible in the TV nook. You may also want to use zip ties or better yet, velcro strips to tidy wires p even more so.

Before: After:

Revamp Your Old Kitchen Table with this DIY Tile Idea

August 15, 2019 by Adam@SheekGeek

FTC disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission for purchases made through my links.

We’ve had the same table for more than 10 years. It was showing some serious wear, especially once the little one came along. The table isn’t made of actual wood, it’s compressed dust with a thick wood veneer. For years Jess wanted to do a tile mosaic on top of this. Due to an abandoned project (I was going to build a tile gas fireplace for our patio), we had some tiles in the house. We had both this wood-patterned tile (which is on clearance for half off at the time of writing this blog post!) and this Spanish patterned tile. Both of these can be substituted for other tiles and patterns depending on your personal preferences and table preferences. For instance, this similar but more gray tone wood-patterned ceramic tile would pair well with this patterned tile.

We arranged our tiles on the table just to see what different designs might look like. Here were our three main options based on tile and table size:

1. ) This first arrangement idea was the Spanish tile on everything. This was too busy by itself, so we added our place mats to break up the pattern.

We weren’t really feeling that one, so we tried a different arrangement.

2.) The second idea was with a centerpiece of the Spanish tile and a border of tiles that look like wood planks. Overall we liked the look, but it didn’t work out well because the two types of tiles were ever-so-slightly different dimensions.

Plus, if you are going to go with a bold tile you might as well feature it, so…

3. For the third idea (which we picked) we laid out a Spanish tile centerpiece and border with the wood tile only in the middle.

Once this was decided, we glued the tile down to the table with acrylic adhesive. Once this dried for a week or so, we then grouted the cracks with a dark grout called “truffle”. A couple of things we learned was not to have too much water in the grout mix, otherwise it’ll dry with lighter whitish spots in places. This was (sort of) fixed by using white vinegar. Another thing we worried about was the edging. At first we just used the grout and our finger to cover the edge of the tile and smooth the transition to the table edge, but over time this proved quite fragile and pieces kept breaking off. The fix was to move to a silicone caulking material (in Charcoal color, the best match to the Truffle color we could find). This isn’t the first time we used silicone caulk as you can see on our hardwood to tile transition of our flooring.

When we applied the sanded silicone caulk, it didn’t look the same at first, but when it dried it became much darker and looks great!

First we laid out painters tape on the whole table, including around one tile that had come off when I got too aggressive digging out the grout on the edge. We then caulked around the edges with this sanded caulk, smoothed with a gloved hand and then peeled off the tape. Don’t touch it for a few days! It takes a long time to cure.

Overall, it has been holding up great to the wear and tear of our toddler. This DIY has brought new life to an old table.