JacobCoffinWrites

If you've seen any of my previous posts here, you may have noticed that I enjoy woodworking. I’m also very sentimental, so I save our Christmas trees after we take them down, dry them, strip the branches, and keep the trunks for future projects. I think it’s nice to have that bit of story behind something you make.

(I don’t know what the slrpnk.net opinion on Christmas trees is. Around where I live, when a farm or orchard goes out of business, developers turn it into another subdivision. A tree farm might not be an ideal environment, but I’m willing to bet on it being better than another clearcut, paved, human neighborhood. So for us, we figure we can give some money to the Boys and Girls Club, help keep a farm solvent, and then use the wood for projects.)

I use them for small items mostly – I’ve got a set of lathe projects I plan to show off next, but for the moment, I’m going to focus on the little carvings I’ve been doing.

My wife loves the new zelda games, especially searching for koroks. (Koroks are little forest spirits that live in the game and hide all over the game map. Finding them can be as simple as picking up a rock or more complicated, doing timed challenges or figuring out a mild puzzle.) She shares the Nintendo Switch with my brother- and sister-in-law though, so I hide these little guys around our apartment for her to find when she can't play.

Like I said, the wood comes from our Christmas trees and the paint I use for their leaves is 15-year-old acrylics from back when I played warhammer. Electricity and time spent, but no new materials.

I start by using the bandsaw to cut a section of tree trunk from the Christmas tree. I use the belt sander to flatten one side, then use the band saw to square it up a bit, similar to ripping full-size tree trunks into dimensional boards on a sawmill (I don't like to lose too much material, but you need at least a couple flat sides to safely rip the piece lengthwise and so you can draw on one side and still lay it flat while you cut it out.

After I cut them out, I rough them into shape with the belt sander and a boxcutter, then a dremel.

Before sanding, I like to paint the mask. This gives it plenty of time to dry (so I can come back and make adjustments) while I sand the main body. I'm not as good at painting as I was when I was a kid, but I can still do a bit of detail work when I have to.

Then I do lot of sanding with sandpaper. I like to read a ebook while I sand out any blemishes.

I drill through the mask for the branch/nose (if there is one), and use the same dab of glue to attach the nose as to fasten the mask to the korok. After I glue the mask on, I set them on a bench outside to dry - I remember super glue fogging my warhammer minis, and airflow is supposed to help.

One of the really things I love about woodcarving is the way the wood comes with constraints that can shape the final piece. You have to adjust your plans as you find quirks and irregularities in the material, or as you damage it or make mistakes. It feels a bit like a collaboration between you and your work. I generally really like working around constraints.

You can usually find two koroks in each three-inch piece of tree trunk, but it depends on the size of the koroks you're looking for. Sometimes it turns out there isn't a korok in a piece of wood. Sometimes there's just a mask.

These are fun, and quick to make - at this point, they usually go from a chunk of tree to a finished, painted carving in about 4 hours. I could probably take more time and put more detail into them, but to be honest, making sure there's a lot of them to find was a higher priority for me than sanding out every blemish or making the leaf as thin as possible in pine.

At this point, I've almost used up our 2020 tree. Its branches have been useful when I need wooden pegs, and now that I have a lathe to work with, the already-round, dried wood is useful for that. Luckily I have a few more to work with.

Garlic Mustard is invasive where we live, so we try to knock it back a bit, and use it to make pesto, and fillings for pasta

This one was scratch-built as a gift. They wanted a shoe rack and sent me some links of examples for sale on amazon. The designs weren’t consistent, so I took what I felt were good features from each and built one from lumber I had.

Most of it was just pressure treated 2”x4”s someone on Everything Is Free had been looking to get rid of while cleaning out under his deck (these are the ones with thick, visible grain and a slight greenish tinge (always wear a dust mask while sanding but especially for these)) and older heat-treated 2”x4” whose origin I don’t remember.

The top section's side plates and the supports for the lower shelf were cut from lengths of white-primed trim – these were edge-glued boards, meaning they were glued together from pieces of smaller scrap, and had zig-zaggy joints straight across the face of the lumber here and there. Because these joints are kind of ugly and not as strong as the regular wood, I cut sections from it that didn’t include them. Then I sanded off the white primer (wear a dust mask for this too) so I could stain them to match the rest of the piece.

The hardest part was finding something for the shelves themselves. I had a few thin lengths but not enough, and ended up posting to the Everything is Free page with a couple example photos asking if anyone had something close. Within minutes a guy offered up some bedrails he’d found on garbage day. He had taken them so they wouldn’t go to waste but didn’t have a project in mind and was happy to offer them up. I sanded them down smooth and cut them to length.

Wherever I can, I use wood screws as they’re much easier to remove than nails. But for a piece of furniture with very visible joints like this, I used finish nails almost everywhere. I also glued the joints as I nailed them so they wouldn’t work apart (this was especially necessary on the top, as the finish nails were thin brads and the slats liked to try to wander as I hammered others into place).

Once it was done, I treated it to the usual stain and polyurethane (both left over from previous projects, the stain I think was second-hand).

I was pleased with the final product - it's surprisingly sturdy for something without any 45's in the design - and the recipient liked it quite a bit, which is what matters.

I wrote this for !zerowaste but it kind of feels like a better fit for diy.

https://i.imgur.com/oBgXyBW.jpg

I don’t have any in-progress pictures of this one, but it’s such a simple design I doubt you'll need them. I responded to a post on the local Everything is Free page where a guy was cleaning out all the lumber left under his porch. At the end of the week he had a dumpster coming and anything that hadn’t been taken he would throw away.

I loaded up my car with what I could fit, but there was this big roughcut 2x12 plank that looked like it had been used as scaffolding (paint marks and boot prints). It was too long to fit in my car but he was renting a chopsaw with the dumpster, so he offered to cut the board to length when they showed up and set it aside for me. So I was able to go back for it (ever since, I’ve brought saws, a tape measure, a square, and a marker with me whenever I pick up lumber). I asked him to cut it to a six foot length, and he even saved the extra for me, which worked out well because I made the rest of the bench out of it.

After having spent some time restoring fancy furniture, I wanted to try something more rustic. I cut the leftover material into three pieces, two legs/sides, and one square piece to cut in half diagonally for support. On the two uprights, I cut a decorative notch in the base, and tapered the sides. I had to use a hand saw for most of this as the skillsaw didn't like the thick plank.

https://i.imgur.com/akUnIBT.png

I nailed down through the top into the legs, then flipped it, put the 45s in place and drove screws through the angled surface into the legs and the underside of the bench. Then I drove screws in from the outside of the legs, and nails through the benchtop.

I gave the benchtop and sides a very casual sanding, just to knock away any splinters and rough spots, and urethaned it so it would last longer.

It's not as pretty as some of the things I've made, but it's strong, and simple, and was made out of wood I got for free and screws/nails/urethane I already had.

This was a more recent project. This lathe belonged to my brother’s girlfriend’s family. They were looking to get rid of it, and knew I had a workshop, so they offered it to me. (I accepted it sight unseen, as the description was vague enough that I honestly wasn’t sure if it was for wood or metal – worst case, I didn’t have a wood lathe yet, but you don’t pass up on the chance to get a metalworking lathe for free!)

It turned out to be a pretty basic Craftsman monopole wood lathe from the 80s. Most of the discussion I’ve found about these said that they were okay at best, fine to learn on but not worth spending much money to buy when there were better designs available out there.

It had been stored somewhere damp and had gotten pretty rusty, and the risk seemed low, so I decided to make a project out of it and learn some tool restoration skills. It ran as-is, but leaving tools rusty always felt kind of disrespectful to me.

I started by disassembling it, which took some doing and a lot of PB Blaster (once WD failed). I treated a couple of the little levers with white vinegar before reading that that was bad for the steel and the galvanized coatings, so I switched to evaporust, which I like a lot. You can save the stuff and reuse it, again and again, until it stops working (and even then it’ll work as degreaser).

All the small parts I dunked in a small bucket of evaporust, but the pole I had to wrap in paper towels soaked in evaporust and then with plastic so it wouldn’t dry. This stripped most of the rust but left a blackish crud that I had to scrape away with steel wool.

On metalworking tools, it’s common to protect them by coating them in oil, but I was advised that sawdust and oil aren’t a good mix, that the grease will collect sawdust and form a kind of cement-like crust as it dries. Considering the options I saw on tool repair forums, I chose two different ways to protect the cleaned parts. The little loose levers, bolts, screws, and threaded parts I treated with cold blue (often used to touch up scratches on guns) and on the monopole I used Johnson's paste wax, which is a floor wax that a lot of woodworkers apparently swear by.

The final result was pretty nice, I think. Between the coatings and the furnace keeping the workshop nice and dry, I haven’t seen the rust return.

This was a kind of odd project, but I think it’ll fit. Back when I was researching ways to reuse plastic from 3d-printers, I ran across a thread discussing HDPE, turning plastic bags (if you can find only filmed HDPE ones) into printer filament through something like a filastruder, and that got me thinking about milk jugs. HDPE is a very strong plastic, is readily available, and can tolerate being re-melted better than many others. When melted and formed into shapes, it’s hard, and glossy/smooth.

My experimental design was simple, a little owl figure (like a squishmallow) to make into a necklace for my spouse.

I carved a simple wooden mold, and set up outside with an old toaster oven (the fumes can be dangerous, it’s important not to heat it anywhere near 400 degrees Fahrenheit – I found 250 to be more than sufficient). I cut part of a milk jug into thin strips and piled them on a piece of sheet tin and let them soften in the oven. Once they were soft and sticky, I used a pair of pliers to wad them into a ball and pressed them into the mold.

It took a little clean up (trimming the flat disk of extra plastic which forms between the two sides of such a crude mold and adding the faint little face) but it worked alright. After a few tries, the soft pine of the mold started to compress a little, the softer wood around the dark grain receding slightly so the grain marked the plastic.

It was an interesting one-off with some potential, but probably better done by people who know more than I do. I don’t generally like plastic projects like this because of the scrap which isn’t going to get accepted by a recycling center (if they actually recycle it at all) but I like the potential for local reuse of material and I could always melt it again. I thought about making a beta fish mold, so the disk of extra would form its fins, but never got around to it and let the project drop. As materials go, it actually feels pretty nice to touch and to carve, and I could see perhaps using it to make tool handles or something similar, if for some reason I wanted plastic rather than wood, which generally works best for me.

When my phone abruptly died a year ago, I stumbled into the world of degoogling and alternative ROMs for android devices while researching my options. Due to a lack of devices to try it on (so far, I’ve used each phone until it completely gave out) I haven’t messed with this yet, but I love the concept and wanted to share it here. This is just scratching the surface of options, and some of you may have more experience here, just wanted to share a resource for eking more life from devices which are no longer receiving security updates.

Ripping right from https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-install-lineageos-on-android/ : “LineageOS is the most popular ROM for Android devices. It garners vast success due to its near-stock Android experience with no bloatware, and a clean and uncluttered interface. It provides regular security updates and bug fixes that often lack in some stock ROMs. Additionally, it gives you a higher level of customization than the stock Android firmware. Even better, this ROM supports an extensive list of devices, including older ones that no longer receive official updates.”

For me, the security updates are the big thing. With the threat landscape online, I think the way most of use use smart phones, security updates are a critical requirement. Companies don’t really have any motivation to continue supporting legacy devices, though. Long-term support costs them resources and person-hours while providing an alternative to buying their brand new products instead. Some corps offer guarantees that they’ll support security updates for X years as a feature, but after that, they’re more or less incentivized to stop updates as soon as possible. Similar to planned obsolescence, though perhaps a little less underhanded.

To me, LineageOS and other community-based nonprofit alternatives represent a very solarpunk rejection of fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and tech as a quickly-disposable product. Thanks to various Linux distros, I’ve been able to keep computers limping along long after they lost OS support from Microsoft, Apple, or Google, so having a similar resource for phones and tablets is excellent.

Hi! I’m Jacob, it looks like I’m going to be taking over as mod for this community. It looks like the original intent was to celebrate/talk about repairing stuff/the right to repair stuff, and perhaps the intersection of tech and solarpunk ideals and how to mix them. I’m a big believer in using what we have, including technology, to try to build a better, more environmentally just world (never been one to let the perfect be the enemy of the good). I like fixing things and making them last long past any planned obsolescence or sane expectation of the lifespan of a product.

I thought by way of introduction, I’d share an old project. When my grandfather died, I inherited many of his tools. This drill press belonged to my great grandfather. If I’ve got my understanding of the characteristics right, (three-prong feed lever, this specific chuck) it dates to 1951.

My great grandfather had a… casual relationship with electricity.

Everything still worked great but the wiring worried me. The original cord was non-polarized, not grounded, and the white (red?) wire's insulation had crumbled away basically anywhere I could see it. Great-Grampa had added in a light switch, by slicing back the insulation and cutting one wire, which worked but was unsafe. (Shocks aside, imagine trying to grab that in an emergency, when a piece has gotten away from you and is spinning, or when you’ve got an article of clothing caught in the works).

Luckily the motor's internal wires' insulation looked just fine. The motor has the old fabric-insulated wires, which, ironically, seem to have held up much better than the rubber stuff. I'm glad I didn't have to do anything with the motor internals, a couple rebuild videos have shown me they're a fun mix of overbuilt and delicate from age.

My goal was to overbuild everything, so I rated everything for the motor's power needs and added a grounding wire, weatherproof box, and a tool-grade switch intended for various Powertec power tools.

I had to modify the switch box to fit the new switch, and painted it to match the drill press. I like this because I can slap it into the off position without looking at it.

I love this machine. It’s big, bulky, and weighs a ton, but it’s on its fourth generation of users and I don’t doubt it’ll continue. I love the simplicity of it, the exposed and easily-replaceable belts and motor. I love how easy it is to maintain and fix.

About a year after I finished working on this, I read the book Ecotopia. The book is from the 1970s but it had a section dedicated to the Right to Repair in a society where most tools and appliances are designed with a similar ethos. From “Ecotopian Television and its Wares”:

“Objects that are available in stores seem rather old fashioned. I have seen few Ecotopian-made appliances that would not look pretty primitive on American TV. One excuse I’ve heard is that they are designed for easy repair by users. At any rate they lack the streamlining we’re used to – parts stick out at odd angles, bolts and other fasteners are plainly visible, and sometimes parts are even made of wood. I have, however, observed that Ecotopians do repair their own things. In fact there are no repair shops on the streets. A curious corollary is that guarantees don’t seem to exist at all. People take it for granted that manufactured items will be sturdy, durable, and self-fixable – which of course means they are also relatively unsophisticated compared to ours. This state of affairs has not been achieved easily; I have heard many funny stories about ridiculous designs produced in the early days, lawsuits against their manufacturers, and other tribulations. One law now in effect requires that pilot models of new devices must be given to a public panel of ten ordinary people (‘consumers’ is not a term used in polite conversation here). Only if they all find they can fix likely breakdowns with ordinary tools is manufacture permitted.”

While reading the vintage machinery forums, I came across a more succinct quote: 'These old tools don't break, they're just missing parts.'

I think that's a really nice way of looking at it.

Reckoning press is a nonprofit, annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. I dig the stories I've read of theirs so far, and they seem to have really good goals.

This was a recent one, kind of the start of refinishing furniture with the intent to give it away on our local Buy Nothing -type page. We found this old kid-sized chair on the curb on garbage day. The finish (some kind of shellac, I think) was peeling or gone in places, the wood was a bit weathered, scuffed, and water stained.

I sanded it down and posted a photograph of it with the bare wood, surrounded by cans of stain, to the facebook group, offering it up with a promise I’d stain it whatever color they picked form the pile (or provided themselves) and urethane it. I ended up having to do a little raffle as there was a decent amount of interest. The winner picked a nice medium brown color and I stained it and urethaned it.

The person who received it was delighted – it turned out she was a retired teacher, and had fond memories of these chairs. She brought us a pot-holder her granddaughter had knitted to thank us for it (which was unexpected but very nice!).

This was an interesting one – we found this table on the curb on garbage day. The finish on the tabletop was peeling and rough. Possibly from water damage? We knew it would be challenging because the surface had a very thin wood veneer on it, but it wasn’t likely to be taken by anyone else in this condition so we lugged it home to try fixing it.

We had to sand the finish off, but we also had to be careful to avoid sanding through the veneer. We used a very smooth sandpaper (starting with 220 grit) and carefully sanded with the grain for each panel so as not to scratch the wood.

Once we had it completely cleaned off, we finished it with high gloss polyurethane. I don’t think we stained the wood first but it’s been awhile and it’s possible we did. This picture is during the first coat (applied following the grain). Once it was dry we sanded very lightly, wiped away the dust, and coated it again.

When I think about salvaging these things, I tell myself it's not just the wood (decompostable or burnable for power) that I'm salvaging, but the resources and person-hours spent making it. Trees were cut and hauled and milled to size, the pieces transported, machined down, turned on lathes, planed, routed, cut, and glued. Even on a factory-made piece there's a bit of history and it's worth keeping around if possible.

I could probably also post this to zerowaste, but I think food seems like a good fit. This is about as easy and low-risk as making cheese gets, and a great way to use up expired milk!