Category Archives: Home projects

For Christmas this year I built a new thing!  Here’s the necklace wall mount I built: The design uses six pieces of pine glued together into a tiered structure.  Then I extracted the wall mounting hardware from some Ikea parts to … Continue reading →

Here are some sweet jack-o-lanterns from the Halloween party this year! Guess which one is mine!  The dinosaur?  Good guess, I should have made that one.  I tried to make the world instead…

I just built a sweet climbing board for my pullup bar.  Take a look:

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The first step is to prepare a saturated solution of sugar in water.  I was surprised to discover that about 2 cups of white sugar dissolve into 1 cup of water.  Don’t forget the blue food coloring!

The second step is to cool the solution very slowly back to room temperature.  I recommend performing the cooling step over 2-3 hours.  I used nested pots to control the temperature: the larger pot contains water and the smaller pot contains the saturated solution.

The third step is to remove the crystals from the saturated solution and wash off the syrup to yield the dry, brittle final product.  It took me a hammer and a few screwdrivers to get the biggest crystals out, and then an overnight air drying before the rock candy was ready to go.

Boom!  Instant meth! Continue reading →

So I finally got around to making a proper spice rack for the kitchen.  The old one was overflowing and spices were falling everywhere, but luckily there is a home depot a few miles nearby.  You almost can’t see it in the picture, but there is an acrylic sheet keeping the spices from falling out, while also leaving the spice labels fully legible.

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