so close to finishing

I've made quite a bit of progress since the last post. So far I've added several layers of paint on everything (4 cans of spray paint to be exact, I should have used primer), after a couple of days of painting, drying, and more painting everything was finally ready to start re-assembling:


To start I screwed in the rollers for the original shelves.


Next the shelves went in.


So far so good. Everything fits just like it did before




Here it is with the drawer faces on and the new handles in place.



Got the new rollers installed on the drawer platform and the side panels.




Drilled a big hole in the back panel piece for wires to go through.


I then glued all three of the new top panels together just so it would be easier to get the whole thing situated and nailed into the top. I'm going to let the glue set overnight just to be safe, and because I have the time to wait.

More progress...

I got a really good chunk of my work done for this project on sunday. I got my nightstand totally disassembled, got my pieces of particle board cut out, and spent a good 2 or 3 hours sanding absolutely everything by hand. After all that I was able to paint a couple of layers of black lacquer over every piece of wood, its been curing for 48 hours as of today and is ready for the backsides to be painted and anything else touched up, then either tonight or tomorrow I will re-assemble everything and be done with the nightstand. Here are some photos:

Here's all the individual pieces of the nightstand and the particleboard with my measurements on it




Here are the extra pieces I need from the particleboard




And here are all of the pieces drying with the laqeur layered on

Making some progress...

I took a trip to goodwill and home depot today to pick up all my necessary supplies and surprisingly I got everything I needed in one quick trip, my expenses totaled to about $30, a bit pricey but not so bad considering im turning a piece of junk into a nice high quality custom piece of furniture instead of just throwing it away and spending $150 on some "designer" piece of crap. Here's a list of all the items I gathered:

1) A slightly damaged but still usable piece of medium density particle board (the same stuff my night stand is made of), its just big enough for me to cut the pieces I need without having too much waste, and since it was out of the scrap bin it only cost me 1$.

2)A 14" x 17" piece of glass that I scavenged out of a crappy old picture frame from goodwill. The glass isn't quite as thick as I'd like it to be so we'll see how it holds up, if it breaks it should be pretty easy (and cheap) to replace. - $5

3) 3 pieces of sandpaper - $3

4) 2 cans of high quality lacquer black spray paint - $10

5)1 big tube of wood glue - $3

6)2 nice looking brushed metal handles for the drawers - $4

7)metal rolling mechanisms for the sliding platform - $6


It's too late for me to be cutting up wood and going to town on this thing so I'll get started on it first thing tomorrow. There's a pretty good chance I could get this whole thing done tomorrow, in which case I might consider tackling one of my other proposals and have it be a multi-part project. We'll see how it goes tomorrow

Off to a good start with the first project

So I decided to go with my first proposal for this proejct, which is to re-construct my night stand and hack my cd player to work with an ipod. Here's the original proposal:
So what I've done up to this point is worked on the cd player and successfully hacked it to work with my ipod. I documented the whole process to show how it was done:

Here is the cd player in its normal / unmodified state:
\Here is what it looks like on the inside after I take off the outer pannels:


Originally my plan was to solder a simple audio cable onto the board itself, but after investigating trying to figure out where to solder i realized it was too complicated and there was an easier way to make the ipod work with this thing. I had an old DIY project from Johns 252 class which was pretty similar to this (http://uoregon.edu/~cwilson9/artd252/DIY/1.html). As cool as this little jambox was i never really used it, and I figured by taking that apart and using bits from that to make it work with my cd player would be more useful. So my new idea was to not just solder directily into the cd player but to use this extra chip as a basic amplifier for the ipod and then just wire the output directly to the cd players' speaker output. So technically this method wouldn't be using the cd player at all to play the ipod, just the speakers.

So I took out the old chip from the jambox and proceeded to solder in the input wire for the ipod and the output wires for the left channel.


Here is the amplifier chip:And here it is with all the wires soldered in place:



Once all the wires were soldered and figured out it was time to soder the left and right channel wires into the cd players output.

I unscrewed the output pannel so i could work with it easier.

Heres what it looks like with the wires soldered in place :

After trying for quite a while to fit the chip into the cd player I realized it just wasn't going to happen so my only option was to secure the chip to the back of the cd player and cut a couple of grooves for the wires to feed into. Kind of ghetto but also really cool and dorky looking.

So that's it! I hot glued to ipod chip to the back and it fits perfectly, and looks pretty sweet. To the naked eye it looks just like the ipod is plugged straight into the cd player like it would any other, which is what my goal was for this part of the project, so it was a sucess.

The next part of the project is to start collecting parts for the actual nightstand. I need to find a good solid piece of glass to fucntion as the table top, some good pieces of plywood, some rollers for the drawer thing, and probably a lot of other odds and ends. This weekend I plan on making lots of visits to home depot, bring recycling, and goodwill to start collecting these parts, and if I'm lucky I can start actually working on it this weekend.

DIY : How to fix a dryer belt

About a week ago my dryer decided to stop tumbling. The heat mechanism still worked but the drum wouldn't turn, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and do a DIY project to fix my dryer and save some money.

1) The first step is to look online and find out the easiest way to take off the outer shell depending on your model.

2) Next I had to pull the dryer out of the wall, unplug it of course, and take off the ducting.

3) After that I had to take off the back cover. It ended up looking like this from the back.
4) Next thing was to take out the lint filter and unscrew the fan casing and take it off.

5) Now its time to pry off the top part of the dryer. I simply used a flathead screwdriver to pry it off of the clips from the front, and the hinges on the back just hold it up. It looks like this:

6) Now to get the front off. First I had to unplug the door sensor wire, then unscrew a couple of bolts in the top corners, and by lifting up the whole front comes right off and looks something like this:

7) I then carefully took the entire drum out of the unit to investigate and figure out what happened to the belt. It turned out that the belt didn't break but an idle pully somehow got knocked over so the belt became loose, a very simple fix.
* this picture from google shows how the whole belt system works in better detail:8) I simply put the idle pully wheel back in place and looped the belt through it like so:



9) For the next part I had my roomate slide the belt over the drum while I held the drum in place, a bit tricky at first.

10) Once the belt is secure then you just retrace your steps of taking the thing apart. Put the face back on, snap the top in place, screw the fan filter case back in place, put the back cover on and make sure it works. Now I can do my 2 week old laundry finally!

Your lifestyle your design -> Proposals

My Group: Back to basics

My Problem(s) in relation to the group:

I don't like the idea of paying some large corporation to manufacture cheap generic furniture that doesn't fit my lifestyle aesthetically or functionally. I want to have more control over my immediate surroundings and to have items like furniture customized/personalized to fit my needs, I want to cut out the middle man and become more self reliant.

These proposals are focused on specific items around my house that need redesigning or complete rebuilding. I want to tackle this problem in a proactive/ hands-on way so I feel the best way to do that is to find these things in my environment which are poorly designed and re-configure them myself.

Proposal 1:
Proposal 2:
Proposal 3: