The Garage: A craft-y type thread for handypeople

Trying to learn working with metal properly. Behold, my precioussss

A ring I've made, from melting down silver to polishing

Nice!

Man, I loved making jewelry back in high school. But it's such an expensive hobby. (Says the woman who bought $140/yard bushing cloth to repair an old piano.)

So I guess colour matching paint and fabric for one of my costumes would be a lot easier if the colours of the screen-used examples were actually consistent from one reference source to another.

So, the resin miniature heads from Kromlech finally arrived, and I started assembling the Leichenjager and the big guy. As for the former, I managed to re-build a Chordclaw from an Adeptus Mechanicus Sicarian Ruststalkers set into a left-handed one, and with a bit of Green Stuff it'll be serviceable. As for the latter - I decided to re-pose his legs as far as sanding down the setting pegs on the Kastelan robots allowed me, but without a base I can't set the other leg correctly.

Also, I'm wondering about sourcing an Autocannon or Lascannon and making the big guy's Arm Cannon into a combi-weapon, as the phosphor blaster seems weedy on its own.

edited 10th Mar '16 12:53:53 PM by NotSoBadassLongcoat

Had to leave my piano project alone for awhile, to prevent myself from coming to hate it. Just got back at it. Still haven't found someone who does small-scale nickel plating. But I refinished the underside of the bottom board. Used water-based polyacrylic, which never looks as good as polyurethane, but nobody's gonna see it and the board is black to begin with.

Sanded some more hammers. I'm getting better at it, but man does it take awhile. Someday I'll have to try using a Dremel tool.

One of these days I need to take the plunge and attempt the mystery which is hide glue. Not sure whether I want to use my gas stove top or try it with my little hot pot instead. I have a double-boiler, but I don't need that much glue.

I've sewn the new buttons onto my commissar coat. That after spraypainting the buttons silver, as they originally were finished in some weird black and white patina.

I have no idea what's up with that coat, as one of the buttons on one side was sewn on crooked, all buttons on that side were sewn on through the lining, hinting at some home-made fixes, buttons on the other side were factory-sewn with some industrial-strength thread so tightly there were three pretty big holes in the cloth left, and there were three small buttons sewn on the rear slit for pretty much no purpose at all.

Not to mention that the shoulderboards were Air Force ones (while the buttons had an anchor on them), almost as if the entire coat was some half-assed mickey mouse piece of crap made for a gullible tourist.

edited 11th Mar '16 3:50:57 PM by NotSoBadassLongcoat

Hide glue experiment was a success! My little hotpot held the perfect temp (140°F) to work as a double-boiler. Portable, too. So I've attached several pieces of wool to various bits of wood.

Though my piano repair manual's instructions a little off. I don't know if the glue-making process has changed any in the last 40+ years, but the glue crystals expanded a lot more than the book said they would. I now have 2 jars of unused glue sitting in my basement. (Thankfully, it can be reheated to use later.)

It occurred to me a couple days ago that I should really wear a dust mask when sanding hammers. Wool dust can't be good for my lungs.

OK, I'm confused about presser feet for sewing spandex. Some places say I need a walking foot, some places say I can get by with an all purpose foot, and for some reason I got it into my head that I needed a plastic / teflon foot like I would for stretch vinyl (although my project plans mean I'm not going to need to work with that any more).

Can anyone help?

Well, got the paint in for my helmet kit.

Cut up strips of printer paper and pin it to the spandex to stabilize it as you sew, then tear out the paper once you're done. Go a bit slowly until you get a feel for it.

Yeah, I've seen places recommend using baking paper as a stabiliser, as much to stop the feed dogs on the machine from eating the fabric as anything else.

So I guess this is going to be useful.◊

Hmh. Someone threw out a VCR and as much as I'd like to turn it into a HTPC casing, I can't afford the internals.

I also took apart my XCOM pack, as I intend to rework it.

So I hit some stuff with an aerosol vinyl dye a couple of days ago, and since then the coloured areas have stayed tacky to the point where one pulled the graphite off a pencil line on paper.

Anyone have any idea what I've done wrong?

What did you spray it on? 'Cause that sounds like a reaction between materials. Kinda like how super glue melts fabric, or how polyurethane wood finish refuses to cure/dry when used on cocobolo wood.

It was on to fake leather (polyester-backed polyurethane).

As far as I know I did do the spraying at too low an ambient temperature (21C is listed as the minimum) so that probably didn't help.

edited 23rd May '16 9:14:58 AM by Deadbeatloser22

That and I probably didn't clean the area properly first.

Yeah, or you didn't use a basecoat. I had something like that happen with a particular brand of chrome paint: it required cleaning the surface, putting a basecoat and like an entire day of drying, plus it tarnished from merely looking at it. But then, chrome paints are shit.

I asked a friend of mine for directions on upgrading my XCOM pack. Well, it seems that I can go from an entire protoboard to one chip (AT Tiny 85) for controlling the bubbler (that, in case you missed it, went on the fritz, as the pump was fading in and out in sync with the LED instead of running at a constant pace). I just have to salvage a DIP 8 mount from the old bubbler board and write a program in Arduino that will read the potentiometer setting and send two PWM signals - one to a FET that controls the LED, and one to a transoptor that controls the FET that controls the pump (transoptor is there because the pump is supposed to run on a separate battery pack - I think that it was the pump that killed my battery packs so quickly).

Then, I'll just have to wait for the Molex connectors that will replace the fiddly control box cable, and rework the arm thingy to use a 3-pin screw-on connector.

edited 23rd May '16 3:35:58 PM by NotSoBadassLongcoat

I didn't think it needed basecoating since it's a dye rather than paint.

I got some wonky plugin for programming AT Tiny chips through Arduino interface, and the pinouts are partially wrong. Right now I'm seeing everything in green after staring at superbright green LE Ds on my breadboard, but hell, that thing does help a lot.

Look what I got for absolutely free!! A yellow vintage styled bike◊ and a red mountain bike◊. They're both rusty and the yellow has a flat tire, but they're otherwise ready to ride.

All I need to do is borrow some bolt cutters and go Mad Max on the lock, replace the flat tire, and then grab some Coke and tin foil to make them shiny and chrome and I have a new method of transportation!

Nice! That yellow one reminds me a little of my mom's old Schwinn. Built like a tank and just as heavy.

Arrrrgh! I got the lock off my red one and tried to test it out, but the wheels won't turn when I pedal! Looks like I'll need to take both of them to the repair shop. The yellow one will get fixed first, since I'm fairly certain the flat tire and rust are the only problems. The red, I'll fix when I have a stable income.

Are you good at disassembling/reassembling things? It might just need to have the gears/wheels cleaned out & re-greased. OTOH it might need the bearings repacked, which is something I would take it to a shop for.

You have my sympathies, anyway. I wrecked my bike (years ago) and recently spent a couple weeks fiddling around with it and googling things. Eventually did get it up and running again, but it was frustrating.

OK, so I assembled the new bubbler driver and all I need to do now is tweaking the microcontroller programming to run the pump correctly. Also, it turns out that I went down from an entire board to just five elements: a microcontroller, an optocoupler, a MOSFET and two diodes.