We finished putting up the frame with some help from my bucketloader. We used lag bolts at the top to attach to the frame of the garage. The goal is to have no support posts so that we can get the large vehicles toys (like bucketloaders and dump trucks) to the back yard. This video is our 2 hours of work squeezed into 2 minutes.

Fixin' up the garage

We're adding a little roof to the side of the garage to protect the short walkway to the side door from falling ice/snow. The bucketloader is helping us out here, as this section of roof is heavy. The frame is made up of wood recycled from another roof that we dismantled. We have some metal roofing (also recycled from the other section of roof) that we will be mounting to this frame.

Fun with LEDs and CNC machines

When my cousin Ian was here during the summer, he wanted to make something cool for a girl... It's amazing what boys will do for girls. He wanted to make something really cool and personalized. I, of course, saw this as the perfect opportunity to play with my CNC machine.

First, we used a super-tiny end mill (0.020 inches in diameter!) to engrave her name in a piece of acrylic.

Then we created a base from polyethylene. While it machines OK, it absolutely sucks to cut on the bandsaw (it just melts against the blade). It was so bad, I ended up using the mill to "cut" the piece from a larger block. Here, we've added an LED. This one is a green (because she likes green, of course) Avago 1W LED. We put one at each end facing towards the center where her name will go.
Here's a test of the unit. The green LEDs shine into the acrylic, and where it hits the engraving, it comes out the front. The picture is a little over-exposed. It looks way nicer in real life.We tucked all the wiring into the base and added a barrel plug in the back that hooks up to a miscellaneous DC "wall-wart" I had laying around. The barrel plug fit nicely into the hole we machined into the base, and there was a slot in the bottom for all of the wires and a resistor (to limit the current to the LEDs). The wires and resistor were kept securely in the base using H.G. technology (that's Hot Glue, for the unacronymned).

Tards repeated on 2 meter amateur radio

Aaron has constructed a 2m receiver and we finished aligning it. Ollie duct-taped a dual band whip base station antenna to make it vertical and we connected it to a vhf/uhf duplexer. The UHF side was connected to a 448.500 MHz transmitter at about 1.5 Watts. The receiver was connected to the VHF side at 147.740. The units were linked with a small PIC microcontroller that Ollie helped me build during the long winter. This provides Morse code ID, tail, and tailbeep, as well as timeout functions. This is all the features you need for a ham repeater which allows you to be rebroadcast from a good vantage point. After a cranky solder joint on the transmitting crystal was identified, I did a road test with KB1FLG with my HT in the car. I was able to go 4.5 miles up route 12 before things got scratchy, not bad for an antenna laying the driveway. This could be the basis of a system that is remotely located and/or solar powered. (BTW, in case you care, the TX crystal was from a toy walkie talkie at 49.830 MHz, which x3 and x3 is 448.5)

Recycling

Here at TardHaus, we like to recycle our aluminum cans. In typical TardHaus style, we don't do it the same way most people do. Instead, we melt the aluminum (using a charcoal-powered blast furnace) and use green-sand molds to make whatever we want. The extra melted aluminum goes into a muffin pan to make "ingots" that can be remelted later and made into more stuff.

I took a couple of these ingots and decided to try them out on my CNC mill. It's an EMCO F1-CNC milling machine that was retrofitted by students from Vermont Technical College with new stepper motors, gecko drivers, and Mach 3 software.
After milling some flats on the sides so my vise could grip the ingot, I milled the face and then played with cutting a circular pocket.

Then I played with machining heatsink fins.

I plan to mount some high-power LEDs to this heat sink and make a more permanent lamp for the CNC machine. The current lamp is a single CREE X-Lamp star that Aaron hacked together for me. It does a good job, but I'd like more light.

Roofing

How do you shingle your screened in porch in seven hours? Hire us. We've needed to do this for a while but it didn't leak so what was the rush? Unfortunately for us our hand was forced and we needed to get it done. The weather hasn't exactly been cooperating so when we finally got a nice day we went for it. The work was started at roughly 4:30pm and work completed at about 12:00am. Everyone chipped in to get this done and it doesn't look half bad.

We had the roof cleared of all the old debris at about 5:30pm.


I'm going to guess this was about 7:30pm or so, we had all the new tar paper in place.


The ground crew measuring and cutting everything we needed to make the install go smoothly.


At about 9:30 SamCo was showing me how to properly apply bug spray. Oh and we had fourish rows of shingles down.


Thanks to Minion for this picture at 12:10am or so. I couldn't have climbed the tower if my life depended on it.

Giant Plant

Part of our lawn has been left to the wilds and we get some pretty weird things growing out there. This however has us baffled. We don't know what it is but it sure does like growing. That's SamCo for height reference.