Something Old And Inexpensive

And when I say old, it was bought from a deceased estate. And when I say inexpensive, it was priced at fifty Australian dollars and a touch of a cold.

An ad for a deceased estate garage sale - which my lovely wife spotted and thought I might be interested in - seeing I'm equipping the garage (or will be the garage once we get the keys handed over) as a "bigger things" workshop. The estate of an older carpenter tradesman, and I glanced over the photos of the offering and spotted a few things I'd like to try for.  

(WRT the "or it will be" reference above, we've found that nothing happens quickly here, the landlord does things or has things done as quickly as possible but the tradies are flat-out everywhere so things take time. Also the landlord himself is doing things as fast as he can but also - after a life of hustling to make a success of himself and his family - is taking regular time out for holidays to enjoy life. Our bathroom took just a few weeks to get from investigation to taken apart to being mostly usable again and then several more for the finishing tradespeople to - well - finish.) 

Anyhow - the morning of the garage sale was cold and wet and by the time I arrived (with me exactly on time and despite the "definitely no early birds" injunction) there were 15-20 cars lined up either side of the muddy laneway leading to the garage. And did I mention that it was 9AM and raining, hence the following cold...

The little garage that the garage sale was held in was pretty chock-full already. Only one mask amongst the lot, and that was me. But I went around the space and checked out most of the items, there was a crate at one spot with about 40-50kg of machine parts, labelled $20. I spotted several things I wanted, a vise screw / turnwheel / threaded boss thing, a mount for a power drill - I didn't want the rest - where would I put it? - so I asked if I could just pay twenty bucks and they could sell the rest of the crate, which they were (of course) happy to do.

Walking around I found a huge old belt sander and a similarly hefty plunge router, more than I wanted to pay and definitely more than I'd ever use. A thicknesser but OMFSM(*) it must have weighed several hundred kilos, being built on a cast iron plinth. Loads of three phase machine extension cords, home made. Again, I would have killed for just the switches off them but didn't want 2cm diameter cables and all the other fittings. 

(* - OMFSM - Oh My Flying Spaghetti Monster)

I was walking out when a dusty mitre saw caught my eye. So did the price tag, the aforementioned fifty dollarydoos. It seemed to have not sold yet despite the pack of people in the garage. When I spotted the same person I'd been dealing with and asked about it he said yep mine for fifty bucks and then looked at the armful of bits I'd just bought. 

And I was sooo confused... Are they a Good Thing or not?

"Oh, you're the guy that could have taken that whole crate full of machine parts for $20 but only wanted those few bits and left the rest of the crate for us to resell, yeah. Tell you what - we pulled it apart to sell the plinth separately but I've got the bolts here and plinth for it there, you can have both for fifty."

So I bought the saw and accepted the stand with thanks. And despite finding those two Youtube videos side by side almost as soon as I got everything home, I've now had a chance to use the saw a few times and it has (as it's designed to do, I guess?) proven to make short work of jobs I'd had to make ramshackle jigs for and go through 57 varieties of hoops to get right. 

Anyway - Aggressive Arthur got loaded into the back of the car, his old plinth (and it was, I could even see where he'd been attached and the footprint matched perfectly, and to top it off I found Arthur in the sale pictures online and at that time it was still on top of the same table) on top, and the handful of other loot alongside. 

So - I may be about to let the cat out of the bag about the garage, and how I'm building small worktables rather than one big workbench and scaling everything to the plastic Stanley fold-up worktable I'd bought second-hand a few years back. But yep - I am.

I've made one such table already ("rough as guts" as we say here but I'm no carpenter, and as you'll see, it's not been easy to work with the gear I've had for most of my life) and made it something that I could add plywood inserts to with various machines - so a small table saw, a router, a jigsaw, etc - and converted my 6" GMC  circular saw to a table saw. It's actually there under Aggressive Arthur in the first few pictures below. But for now, having a good mitre saw is more important than a table saw, and the table I've made is better than the supplied plinth. (Which is actually going to have to be cut down a bit to fit my system anyway.)

Artie is a GMC MS256 ten inch which has been continued for a few years now. But just out of interest I looked for prices of economy 10" mitre saws and found prices for similar saws from $250 to $400ish. I'm well pleased with my price. Anyhow - I've taken it for a spin and it seems quite solid and accurate. My next bench(es) will be better and I'll find ways to make them all fit together. 

Pickup And Beauty Shots

I didn't even see this before I went, only afterwards. This is a picture from the garage sale 

Arthur was actually in the background - to the right of that grey thing with big red wheel on the front - and that's the stand he was on. 

Needless to say, that plinth the saw was on isn't the right height for my worktables so it temporarily finished up on the worktable mounted over the little table saw I'm building. 

This work table hasn't even been finished yet but it's become Arthur's temporary new plinth.

And I wanted saws in both orientations so it became important to give this saw a table of its own.

Artie's beauty shots, on a background of - background.

This was Artie still on the table saw bench. I got a day of good weather (since I still have to work on a veranda amid all our outdoor stuff) and went for it. My back's killing me but the saw's already proven to be a great investment. What had taken me a complete reset on the Stanley bench, a crappy (and very limited) jig, and a lot of swearing, took under five minutes from setup to finished product with Artie.

First cut.

While still on that bench, it made the boards for me to remake its cut-down table. The table was solid - except for the actual top which was mad of 25mm chipboard. And, at some stage, apparently, water. A LOT of water. It was so spongy in places I wasn't surprised the sellers split them apart and tried to sell them separately. 

I shortened the stand I got with the saw and reworked the top.

The stand as supplied was already a smidgen taller than my 'standard' benches, and of course that put the bed of the saw well above. And I wanted to be able to use any of my 'standard' benches as the in-and-out feed tables, so I shortened the stand by quite a lot, chucked out the chipboard and top 7cm or so of the legs, and added some new framework and put the same planks (150mm plinth board, about the cheapest lumber I can get here) on top as I'd put on my benches, and it's now perfect - just a bit taller than the benches so I can use pieces of dowel as rollers. 

This made me happy.

It's not apparent because the veranda floor is decking boards that are weathered and up to several centimetres variable in height, so the spirit level across the two isn't anywhere near level but the heights are right. And I'mn stoked.

There's not too much wrong with the (old) new from what I could tell, I should be able to use it to make any new bits for the shed and then take it apart and do a bit of a service, repack the gears with grease, etc. But for now, it's going to have a big job ahead of it. 

And so am I.

These posts are all about a week or two behind actual events. I'm getting snowed under with everything, and there are a few other posts that explain what's been going on that makes for all the workload. (I know - how did I get time to make a couple of crappy photo collages along with everything else going on? - just know that I do a lot for you, dear reader, to bring you happiness and a smile. Please read on for how you can show your appreciation and support...)

I'll keep sharing all my low-budget projects - I really want to get to the point where the projects I share are about developing easy-to-make machines for cottage industry scale recycling and the odd post about advances in vegetable gardening also on the cottage scale. (And where I say "cottage" I want to also be able to substitute "cottage and/or local community level." )

You can help me by sharing the link to this article or any others you enjoyed. Use the newspaper in the graphic above to go to the News Stand and find other articles to enjoy, use the link there to sign up to my once-a-week newsletter. Or use the coffee mug or Paypal icon to send me a donation. It all helps keep things online and paid up. Thank you.

The Big Store Comes To Town

This is a simple and very short post. Three years ago today, demolition began on the other side of the highway from us.

It started a period of disruption, stress, and constant disturbance that's continued pretty much unabated since then. Almost every goalpost in our lives slid away to the sidelines. 

• There was months of demolition noise
• then a new landlord
• then months of repairs to the house
• and also moving major things here and there to allow the block split
• then the second house works out in the new split
• then construction began across the highway
• then more repairs to the house 
  And in between there were other minor things like - oh, you know, cataract surgery, bladder cancer resection, oh yes and the pandemic, and various other health issues and then COVID - if anyone deserves to win a huge Lotto prize and go on a six month holiday it's us...

But also we've become a lot more resilient, slightly crazier, and - with any luck - the last big disruptions will end with this year 2023 and then things will return to just our normal chaos. 

Peace out...

Why I sometimes Actually Do Not

There's a nice picture of a positively HUGE garage in my article last week titled "What Do I ActuallyDo?" and it's one of (and connected with) what I do and don't do. And that makes about as much sense as everything else I write, I just realise. Anyhow - here are some reasons that 

Sometimes I Just Cannot Even

This arrives after the eleventh real life anniversary and twelve years after the Facebook anniversary of our wedding, my wife and me. In the times before that my life was highly changeable and sometimes chaotic and sometimes copacetic, but in the times since, it has also been the happiest I've ever been. 

The last twelve years include four moves, the last of them six years ago to a coastal-adjacent town in Victoria's Bass Coast region, where we can almost throw rocks at Tasmanians, although we shouldn't do that as the wife's family came from that island to Melbourne. 

But the last move has been one of the most conflicting and difficult periods, not least because a certain coronavirus made an appearance, but also a helluva lot of other things happened. We were offered a long-term rental with a rider to "make the place your long-term home" and so we spent our savings doing that - a tall fence to keep the cats controlled, a gazebo in the back yard, a small but new shed for me in the back, raised garden beds, a gazebo and outdoor kitchen. 

I have to also say that this was not tens of thousands of dollars because I did much of the work myself and recycled and used salvaged materials where we could, but still - it was our savings, eagre as they were. (four figures not five, m'kay?) 

Demolition And Pandemic

And across the HIGHWAY from us was a motel, caravan park, and pub/club that had been the focal point for shadiness in the lovely town, but the land was slated for new building works. Long story short, by our second year here there was demolition work across the way for several months that kept us on the ragged edge of our nerves. Then COVID-19, and our landlord had a marriage breakdown and sold the house. 

A House Sold World

For almost a year, the real estate company that managed it kept us on tenterhooks and the ragged remains of our last (or so we thought - but we were ever the optimists) remaining nerve, then a new landlord arrived on the scene and was happy to keep us on - but then split the block en twain as the Twelfth Century English used to say. 

So our nerve was restored, then shredded en twain again, and of course almost our entire outdoor life was in that back yard so we had to strike nine (or was it ten? I honestly can't remember) garden beds and put the best six of them into the front yard. The "front yard" had been a pocket-handkerchief sized patch of lawn that had no fence between it and a footpath which formed a major walkway into the town centre, so we'd actually never left anything on the veranda or lawn. (At least, not after some rotten bastard stole a quite large and beloved plant in a fairly valuable pot from the veranda...)

So that had to wait until the landlord, realising we'd erected a cat fence of considerable size and now had nowhere for them, and had lost our entire vegetable gardens, so he very kindly put a 1.8m paling fence around it, in the process reducing the pocket handkerchief to a ladies' lace hankie. But we loved it, I added cat retaining wings and then moved those six garden beds, and there are articles on these blogs about how I improved them to make them more productive. 

Which Occasioned A LOT Of Work

My by then only just over one year old shed had to be taken apart, hacked and re-shaped to fit the new space allotted, and so 2020 and 2021 were spent doing those things. Then in 2022 when I finally had things going, the local Shire kicked up a fuss. Because there'd be two driveways on one block, the front fence would have to be moved back a metre from the footpath for pedestrian safety. The lace hankie is soon to be a ribbon and more than half to those six garden beds will have to be uprooted again and moved.

Also, a hew hardware store started construction on that newly-cleared land (remember that land? yeah . . .) and if we thought demolition was shattering, we hadn't seen anything yet. This was almost eleven months of unmitigated hell, and it's only because there's now a huge Bunnings almost across the road that kept me out of serious loss of mind, I think.  

Anyhow - among other things, the new split block also required a garage and two carports. The garage is, as you'll see in the photo if you go look at the article linked in the lede, huge. And it turns out that the landlord made it that huge because he was well aware that he'd caused me to have to pretty much destroy my existing shed, and was also tearing down the existing garage (which had never been usable as a garage as one door was rusted shut and it had builder's trash on the ground) that I'd been using to store materials for the work we did and future work. 

The Best Of Best Things Happened

So it turns out the whole huge thing is ours, not the other house on the property. I basically have a 6m x 8m area to become parking and also my new shed. The trade-off is that my old shed becomes so much scrap materials, the parking garage shed we bought for my wife's mobility scooter will be sold or given to a friend. 

But it means also that I have a chance to make a first real workbench, and so I decided to build it A) to match a plastic folding bench I bought secondhand and which is an easy height to lift materials onto, B) to be similar-sized modular units, C) to be mobile and D) for at least one module to become a "multi-tool table" which had interchangeable inserts with a converted had circular saw, jigsaw, router, and later a grinding/sanding machine and finally, E) that it had to be modular so that I could lock benches together in order to make a larger work surface when needed and store the units compactly when not needed. 

And That's Where I'm At

So right now all my other projects have to go on hold because I have to make some slightly better workbenches as mentioned above. Then I'll have to move all the tools and materials and projects into the new garage, which will also mean making storage like shelves and racks for the space while also leaving room to back the car in, the garden equipment, and of course the mobility scooter.

You can understand perhaps that this takes priority over blogging and recycling and other projects. (The garage will offer me the space to set up a modular bench for plastic recycling, for example. For building the mechanical parts of other projects. And for at this stage unimagined new projects. The rewards are considerable.)

One other thing will take priority, moving the garden beds when the front fence has to be moved. We are reliant on the vegetable garden to offset our food bills so this will also be a priority, and having workbenches available will allow me to make anything needed.

What no amount of my effort will solve is the finances. Our philanthropic and very kind landlord will nevertheless stop short at financing materials for shelving and racking, or the cost of a handyman to move garden beds (since I can only do a limited amount of heavy physical work any more) and that will make things very tight - to downright impossible - for keeping up all the online costs involved, and leave nothing in the kitty for desirable projects like building recycling machines and facilities etc.

And so, you know, one of the best things you can do is to hit the KoFi cup or the Paypal logo and make a donation, and better yet, make it a small monthly one. Also use the newspaper to go to my News Stand where you can sign up to my once-a-week newsletter to stay up to date, and share the link to this page with your friends and social network - the more people this reaches, the better the chance that someone will help us with our projects and (in my very artistically talented wife's case) artwork which I'll also post here.