Archive for the 'Tools' Category

If you are lucky enough to have a gas range, you already know the joys of a dead even heat source that can range from medium-low to blowtorch. None of that cyclic all-on/all-off nonsense of the typical electric range, for example.

However, “low heat” is not something in the typical gas range’s vocabulary. On our Viking, the lowest setting on the smallest burner will keep a small pot of water at a rolling boil and will consistently cause a cup of rice to boil over. And it is a really low flame!

Enter the heat diffuser. A heat diffuser sits between burner and your pan or pot. It effectively acts as a heat buffer and, as the name implies, diffuser.

On a gas range like mine, it allows one to achieve the lowest simmer/heat you might want. On an electric range, a cast iron heat diffuser — you want thermal mass — will nicely even on the all-on/all-off behavior of most ranges.

At ~$20, it is a worthy tool to add to your cooking arsenal!

Just found yet another use for my turkey burner. Roasting chile peppers! Worked flawlessly and was a heck of a lot easier than a plumber’s torch.

This kind of gas burner is just incredibly useful for anyone who enjoys cooking. It is designed to be able to heat a pot of grease up to the 350°F necessary to deep fry a turkey (which I have never tried). Thus, the burners put out a truly awesome amount of heat!

Note: The Underwriter’s Laboratory will not certify turkey fryers at all. Why? Because people are stupid and need to be protected from themselves when using powerful tools. When frying, it is terribly easy to cause a grease fire. So, fry away from your house and use the nifty good-eats style turkey crane. And have a grease friendly fire extinguisher on hand.

Or just do what I do and don’t actually fry turkeys on it!

You can find the burners at any decent hardware store. If you do, make sure it has a few features (all of which the burner at left has — except the pot):

Flat Top Surface

The top of the burner should be flat. This is critical if you want to put something on it that is burgerbigger than the burner (like a grill). Yes, I was hungry when I wrote this.

Cast Two-Piece Burner

The burner, itself, should be two pieces of cast iron held together by a bolt through the middle. The burner will get stuff spilled on it and it will rust or corrode. The two piece design makes it trivial to take it apart for cleaning. A wire brush on an electric drill makes cleaning trivial.

Adjustable Air Vents

This is needed to be able to tune the flame. Not just for maximum heat output, but sometimes also for maximum flame height.

Long hose with valve on or after regulator

The gas coming out of the tank is relatively high pressure. The burner’s secondary regulator will take care of regulating down to something more reasonable. The valve after or integrated into the regulator is critical because the pressure off the tank, while high, will change considerably as the tank empties. That and it is nearly impossible to make fine adjustments on the high pressure side of the line.

Stainless Steel Pot

If you get a kit, try to find one with a stainless steel pot. It will last longer and corrode less than aluminum.

Stable Design

Some burners have legs that go straight down or are relatively tall. Stupid. Ideally, you want a three or four legged burner with relatively wide set legs. If three legs, they should spread quite wide for stability (like the one to the left).

OK — so you have the beast of a burner. What can you do with it? I’m sure there is more — comments welcome — but these are just some of the things I have done with mine:

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While making my own low voltage cable light fixtures, I searched high and low for a little piece of hardware that would elegantly connect between the suspension cables and the wires down to the lights.

No luck. Everyone wants to sell you a cable lighting kit or, at best, the only “parts” are $40 bare MR-16 halogen lamp fixtures.

No thanks. Until I could figure out a solution, I simply bent a few bits of heavy gauge copper wire and made hangers like the one at right.

It worked OK, but clearly needed to be replaced with a real solution.

The answer?

Spend less than $10 on parts and make my own connectors. Well, $10 on parts and $225 on the tools necessary to solve this particular problem.

What follows is a description of the tools and some photos of the various stages. If you have even the remotest amount of metal working experience, there’ll be nothing new here (and probably lots of opportunities to make fun of me).

But, as pictured at left, I achieved success!

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We do get weather in California. Beyond the 9 months of sun, we have 3 months of sun and rain. And, believe it or not, cold weather. It actually freezes quite a few times over the winter.

And when you live in a glass house with a gigantic hole in the middle, this can make for a few wet and chilly days.

To compound the issue, we are in the midst of a remodel and, thus, our kitchen is actually in our atrium. We cook, eat, and refrigerate in this open space.

In past years, I have tied a tarp over the hole. It worked, but was ugly and leaky.

Clearly, a better solution was in order.

Many of the Eichler’s in our neighborhood have covers, but most are permanent — intentional or otherwise due to the inconvenience of dealing with it.

When I searched for “eichler atrium cover“, the first non “network” hit was this beauty. Well engineered and stylish, but unintentionally permanent. Coincidentally, that cover was built by Robert Bowdidge, a rather smart fellow that I used to work with at Apple.

So, we took a wander about Home Depot to peruse all of the materials that might be suitable.

Off the bat, I chose Suntuf corrugated lexan panels as the actual covering material. It is lightweight, very strong, and reasonably priced. Suntuf blocks almost all UV radiation.


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Let me be frank: Circular saws scare the bejeezus out of me. Always have. Rotating blades of doom ready to swallow a finger in barely a heart beat, technology be damned (very very cool technology).

As we are in the midst of a remodel where the goal is to recycle as much as possible, it was high time for me to get over this silly fear and get a damned chop saw.

One of our goals is to recycle whatever we can. In particular, recycling he kitchen cabinetry and turn them into cabinets in the garage.

Now, garage floors slope. And garages typically have a 4″ to 6″ sill of concrete on the outside walls. Both of which would require cutting various 2×4s to the right sizes/lengths to build new legs for the cabinets to have them be both level and flush with the wall.

And there is about a zillion other little projects around the house that will require custom bits of framing. Shelves. A cover for our atrium. Repairing the Big Green Egg table.

So, I picked up a basic Craftsman Compound Miter Saw. But it required a table. Initial use indicated that screwing it down to a plank on top of a kitchen cabinet works great, so why not turn one of the recycled kitchen cabinets into a roll-around saw table with built in storage?

Easy enough. That is exactly what I did. Better yet, only the 24″x48″ work surface is new. Everything else is recycled.


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Maker Faire 2008 Day One is over and done with. The show feels like it is about twice the size of last year. The scale of awesomeness is definitely 2x.

There have been a number of changes beyond the scale.

The various displays/booths have been re-organized and the organization makes sense.

The event took over the back parking lot of the fairgrounds and, as such, there is lots of room for various fire arts, very large statue stuff, and various outdoor events.

Gone are the generic arts-and-crafts vendors from the years before, replaced with various “activist” vendors pushing everything from a vegan lifestyle (been avoiding that booth) to awesome chocolates to composting toilets to amazing beer.

The food is awesome this year. While the various carny style food-vendors-that-you-see-at-every-character-lacking-street-fair are still there, you’ll find awesome little bay area food vendors in between. What really good tacos? No problem; beef, whole roasted pork, or braised lamb cheeks — all delicious. Home made yucatan peninsula style tamales, too. Oh, and fresh grilled organic asparagus with a delicious dressing is just around the corner.

Many vendors — TechShop, O’Reilly, EMSL, etc.. — seem to have made the transition from “hey, look, cool stuff” to “hey, look, cool stuff and here is where you can pay some $$ to participate”. Seriously — the show is starting to take on an air of professional marketeering. Only it is still all good– there are many more opportunities to make cool stuff for free than ever before.

The whole show is about interaction. And interact, you do!

Oddly, there are many more decent pinball players this year than last. I’m looking forward to comparing this years audits with the first year’s.

Of course, there is still the grand assortment of kids being exposed to well maintained pinball machines for the first time. Their first reaction is generally “ooh, what is this?!?!?”. Then it becomes all concentration. And, finally, it is the parents reminding them that there is lots of other cool stuff to see!

Awesome stuff. I took a handful of photos in between chatting with many folks about pinball machine restoration.

I’m utterly beat. Have no words. Here are a couple of more pictures. Off to bed to charge up for tomorrow!

This is a perpetual pinball chaos machine. Balls bounce around and trigger lights depending on which color pop bumper is hit.

This little girl met R2D2 and decided to have a dance.

The creator of the amazing artoo detoo robot — Chris — commented with a link to a video of the same dance event.

Thank you!

I have been wanting a new lens for a while (what SLR photographyer — amateur or otherwise — doesn’t?) and had been eying up some serious pieces of glass.

After doing a bunch of research, I ended up with a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. Complete opposite end of the spectrum from the various L series bits of glass linked above. Instead of dropping $1,500 or even $5,000, it cost me all of $76.30.

Why such a cheap lens?

Because it is a total gem.

The build quality is crap, but the image quality is outright amazing — doubly so for less than $100.

It is an all plastic lens with a focus motor that sounds akin to an old 110 film camera with an autowinder. Yet, that also means the lens is extremely lightweight. Combined with my Rebel XT body, it makes for one very small picture taking machine. It is probably 1/3rd of the weight of my 100mm Macro lens (that was pretty much my default lens until now).

With a maximum aperture of f/1.8, the lens eats light. Better yet, I’m finding that I can use the ISO 200 and ISO 400 settings of the camera without worrying too much about noise.

For example, the picture at right was one that I could not have taken with my other two lenses (the 100mm and a 17-85mm IS EF-S lens that is effectively a kit lens). I was shooting under a fairly dense pine tree in a relatively dark environment (all things considered). This is at ISO400 so could capture the always-in-motion nature of a 7 year old in a tree at a fairly high shutter speed (1/200th at f/4). It isn’t the best picture in the world — legs are a bit washed out — but I’m just happy I could take it at all and much more so that I could take it without really having to work at it much.

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At whim, I did a search of ebay for “ confiscated “. I figured that any of the random NTSA security theater booty would likely show up on ebay and “confiscated” would be a reasonable search term.

While most of the auctions show lots and lots of stuff with only 2 or 3 items in the actual auction, there were a handful of “random tools by the pound” auctions. I put a bid in on an allen wrench assortment and actually won! All total, it cost me $25.43 for the pictured set of tools.

I needed allen wrenches, but got so much more. Beyond the allen wrenches, of which there are several very nice sets, there are also a bunch of miniature screwdrivers, some random nut drivers, some driver bit sets, a spark plug wrench and– oddly– a single arcade joystick handle.

Strange. Worth the money and entertaining, to boot. Why the TSA might find an arcade joystick threatening is beyond me. Hell, why was someone carrying such a thing in the first place?!?!!

Or, for that matter, why are allen wrenches a big deal? Or miniature screwdrivers?

Update:The tube finally gave up the ghost after another 20 miles of riding. In the future, I’ll fix it shortly after the tube gets holed at the first convenient opportunity.

And, yes, I will be using this stuff all the time from now on.

I’m overweight; 240 lbs on a 6′1″ frame just isn’t healthy. But 240 isn’t my peak weight. That was the year before last before I started biking to work. Didn’t really do it consistently in ‘05, but did in ‘06 and managed to lose about 17 lbs in the process (and in combination with a voluntary diet change to address a bit of an elevated cholesterol #).

This year, I’m riding every day that I can, starting to do so seriously with the earlier time change. Now, I had my adventures with flat tires. Six flats in 2 weeks when I first started riding. And a handful of flats in the year in between.

Today, I tangled with a flat tire, but it fixed itself. Read on for how…

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Update: A couple of folks of asked where I bought my tools (I have two). I picked it up at Gemplers, which has proven to be a great company.

I’m a higher primate. I like tools. Can’t stand bad tools, though.

The clamptite tool is an amazing tool. One that every tool oriented primate should have.

With this tool and a bit of wire, you can create wire clamps of any size or tightness. I find myself using it for all kinds of tasks, ranging from emergency fixes to craft projects to gardening to permanent repairs. I use it so often that I picked up a 1,000 foot role of 19 gauge galvanized wire specifically for use with this tool.

Seriously, this thing is amazingly versatile. I have used it to:

• Attach vinyl tubing to a copper pipe. Zero leaks. Super strong.
• Fix wooden handles. Simply wrap in a little duct tape to keep things aligned and then use the clamptite tool to add a few wire clamps around the duct tape.
• Fix loose tool heads. I had a rake that kept falling apart. I drilled a hole in the handle and made a wire clamp through the holes and around the head of the tool.
• Connect posts together. For the crab party, I needed 8 foot tall posts for the corners of the tent over the back yard. Ben and I drove 6 foot metal posts deep into the ground and then used the clamp tool to tightly bind 8 foot tall wooden posts to the metal posts.
• Brew beer. Ben created his own counterflow chiller (pain in the ass, btw) and one of the ends was leaky. To seal, we wrapped it tightly in duct tape and then added tight double-wrap wire clamps at either end of the tape. Not a single drop leaks now!
• Repair my car. The silly little plastic wing thing on the back of my subaru forrester broke. I drilled a couple of small holes in it and used the wire clamp to tie the two pieces back together. Works great and looks neat (as in neatly done, not “cool”). The wire clamps can be used quite effectively to pull the ends of things together.
• Make Stuff. I used the clamp tool to tie together 4 candle holders to make a candelabra that hangs over our table in the back yard.

Excellent tool.