dansworkshop

We just acquired this 2001 Honda Odyssey and I'm not sure where the previous owner got his oil changed, but this is what was on it. Here all along I was thinking Fram was the cheap junk filter. Hmm....

I was just climbing upwards to see if there were more domes higher than my diamond one. I FOUND THIS!!

I successfully unlocked my (formerly Verizon) HTC Droid Incredible 2 using http://www.gsmliberty.net/shop/htc-droid-incredible-unlock-codes-p-3384.html and put a Straight Talk "Bring your own phone" GSM sim card in, and activated it. The site promised a 3-10 minute response time, but it took overnight in this case. I'm still happy with it. On the droid itself, I also had to go into the settings and choose GSM mode, and immediately a text from Straight Talk came through, and my new number worked as well.

This is a video I made to describe a problem I was having with my magic jack. The audio was cutting out right when the advertisement changed. I was on hold with verizon and you can hear the hold music and messages break up around 0:10 and 0:16. The tech support told me to go to task manager and set the priority of the magicJack.exe process to "High". That solved the problem (at least for now). Hope this helps if you ever encounter this problem!

This video is simply to show building an ember with charcloth. Getting to open flame is not shown here. More fun projects: http://www.dansworkshop.com

In this video, I show how you can avoid wasting time converting old PC ATX power supplies into benchtop power supplies. The answer is not to convert them at all, but make an adapter. I made a wooden box to contain the binding posts, dummy loads, ATX motherboard socket, and power switch. This enables me to quickly switch out the PS, as I have not modified it in any way. This is a big time saver because I sometimes blow these power supplies and need to replace them. Not only that, I can use this device to test power supplies to see if they work and turn on. Old ATX power supplies are dime a dozen (or free if you like to dumpster dive), so don't sell your soul to them!! Check out my web site at http://www.dansworkshop.com/2012/01/benchtop-power-supply/ This also saves time if you damage a PS while modding it. If the PS was working when you began modding it, and then a bit of ESD fries something, or a slip of the drill damages it while making holes in the original PS's case, et cetera, and then you get all done and turn it on...nothing. Then you wasted all that time doing the mod. Forget all that!! Just make one (or two!) of these adapters. The wikipedia page on the "Power Good" signal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Good_Signal Another link for those too faint of heart for wikipedia: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/power/sup/funcPowerGood-c.html

I made this wood fired water heater from a used 40-gallon natural gas fired Rheem water heater. I just removed the gas burner and then added a firebrick-and-perlite-refractory-lined firebox to the bottom. The firing door is just a $10 Vogelzang chimney cleanout door. The grates are welded together from 5/8" concrete rebar. It makes lots of hot water with very little firewood. Yes, I know the term "hot water heater" is redundant. Find other fun projects on http://www.dansworkshop.com Update: December 29, 2012 - The water heater is still in great working condition, I estimate that it has saved me over $300 already in water heating costs (teenagers in the house) in the three and a half months of use. Update: December 31, 2020 - The water heater is still working great! I have to patch the fire brick every so often, and also rebuild the grates once a year (which only costs about $5).

This is a wood gasifier design that I'm testing. It's made from plain mild steel stove pipe, 24 guage. Seams are sealed with high temp red RTV. I'm running it on pellets in this video. The blower is a 12v air mattress inflator. Cooling stage is an automotive heator core, with a computer fan drawing air through it.

Visit my website for more d.i.y. fun. http://www.dansworkshop.com

A really stupid video of me doing the coke and mentos trick. You'd think there was toxic acid spewing, the way I jump away from it. Visit my website for more d.i.y. fun. http://www.dansworkshop.com

I've recently discovered how much fun uni-strut is to work with. It is nice and straight, smooth, and has radii on six edges. Perfect for making roller slides! Since I already have foundry capabalities in my workshop, I thought why not make castings instead of the usual plywood or MDF construction. This machine is going to be quite rigid and precise, I believe.

I used Blender3d's VSE (video sequence editor) as an exercise in academics to make this review of a lens I got on black friday and modded. Other tools I used were: HandBrake (transcoding) and InkScape (titles).

I made this as a spring project a few years back. Detailed blog post here: http://www.dansworkshop.com/2012/05/wheelbarrow-concrete-mixer/

Here's my CNC plotter, from these videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=51&v=Juvt0CN8wYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaNVAQuvBaY But now, the plotter has been beefed up to perform wood routing. I had a lot of trouble with EMI botching up the USB connection and had to restart it a few times, but it worked quite well and the video is at 1x speed. Here's the original pen plotter article: http://www.dansworkshop.com/2015/04/dell-printer-cnc/ Some people might ask about the breadboard being temporary and unreliable. That's not the case at all. I have many projects that still work beautifully that are built on breadboards many years ago.

This is a follow up to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juvt0CN8wYc&feature=youtu.be Here I had completed the Z axis so that I could raise and lower the pen. And, not only a pen, but then I have a high speed router motor holding the pen. Later I put a bit in this router and cut a sign for my workshop. Here's the original article: http://www.dansworkshop.com/2015/04/dell-printer-cnc/ This CNC machine is made from an old Dell all-in-one printer. Not much is left of it but a thin metal frame. I keep upgrading parts too, soon it will have nothing but a few sensors left from the original.

This is an early iteration of my CNC machine, with only X and Y axis. It's simply drawing a circle and oval twice in the same place. It's very precise and draws exactly over the same lines. Here's the original article: http://www.dansworkshop.com/2015/04/dell-printer-cnc/

This is my trommel to separate charcoal from ash, and to crush it finer so it performs better in a gasification unit on my vehicle or tractor. More info about my alternative energy projects here: http://www.dansworkshop.com/topics/alternative-energy/ It runs on a small AC gearmotor. The cabinet, which amazingly fits the 5-gallon pail trommel screen design, is from a RainSoft(tm) Apollo II water softener.

This is a wood-fired cookstove that I built back in August of 2012. It also generates electricity, plenty to charge a cellphone or two. I dubbed it "The BioHeavy" Read more about it here: http://www.dansworkshop.com/2013/04/thermoelectric-wood-cookstove-bioheavy/

I charred some denim to make charcloth, and I'm trying it out.

This is a response to the ask hackaday organizing collections post: http://hackaday.com/2011/12/13/ask-hackaday-organizing-a-growing-collection-of-electronic-odds-and-ends/

Here is a 2-part series with me going through and explaining all the patterns, one by one, that I used in pouring the castings on my D.I.Y. CNC router that I finished in May of 2016. Part one is here: https://youtu.be/4drTtrM5HTs You can see a build log and some action shots of the machine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56nl06Ok0U Visit my web site for more projects: http://www.dansworkshop.com/

Here is a 2-part series with me going through and explaining all the patterns, one by one, that I used in pouring the castings on my D.I.Y. CNC router that I finished in May of 2016. Part two is here: https://youtu.be/O3Var8TbuNk You can see a build log and some action shots of the machine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56nl06Ok0U Visit my web site for more projects: http://www.dansworkshop.com/

Here is a build log of my CNC router made with aluminum castings produced in my garage foundry, and uni-strut(tm) with roller blade bearings for slides. I worked on sporadically in my spare time for about 8 months. This machine does not use steppers, but instead, servos which are made with DC motors and quadrature encoders. This greatly simplified the drive electronics as well as being cheaper. It is also very quiet as you can tell when I do pen plotting around 5:13. The main controller is an arduino clone running GRBL 9.0c. The 3 axes are driven by an arrangement use boarduinos which take the step and dir signals from GRBL, read the encoders and then drive the motors with PWM using mosfet driver boards I got from robotshop.com: http://www.robotshop.com/en/cytron-13a-5-30v-single-dc-motor-controller.html The boarduinos use firmware I developed and is open source, here: https://github.com/dynamodan/ClosedLoopDC I use BlenderCAM 9 for generating toolpaths, and bCNC for communicating to the controller over a usb cable. https://github.com/vilemnovak/blendercam/wiki https://github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC I also made a two-part follow up video on specifically the patterns I made for casting the aluminum parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4drTtrM5HTs You can find more of my projects on my web site here: http://www.dansworkshop.com/ Music: Landras Dream and Happy Strummin' by audionautix Music by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://audionautix.com/

Here is a demonstration of using a match plate pattern, as well as my simple aluminum melter that uses a stove burner for the heat source. This is a collection of videos and still shots from my workshop in the last few months of building a CNC router using unistrut for the slides, and quite a number of aluminum castings that I produced using my home workshop foundry. Here's a previous explanation of the simple ladle furnace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewM9c2Vp0Ho This is not a how-to video. This is a "how I did it" video and is not a recommendation of how you should do it.

This is a very simple furnace but works very well. It uses just a spiral burner such as those found on electric ranges. It's a lot faster than the crucible-based furnace that I built first. I'm not doing a melt in this video, just explaining how it's made.