Crocheted Mini Marker

I was going through some albums on my computer, and found these pictures. My sister-in-law made these for me a while back, and I guess I totally forgot to write a post on them... Sorry! 

We are super big in to disc golf, and love every aspect of the sport. So when any of us pick up a new hobby it usually means we try and incorporate it into disc golf. She was crocheting some scarfs for herself and family members, when we saw some macrame frisbees at an outdoor adventure store.... so in the spirit of do it yourself, why buy it when you can make it! 

They turned out awesome and fly amazingly well, its pretty easy to reach 100 plus feet and they can be thrown in the house. As always thanks for stopping by, and be sure to follow! 

Never stop creating!

 

Quick & Easy Bird Feeder

Hey Guys, I thought I would share a very inexpensive project that I use to make bird feeders. The thing about these feeder are they are pretty heavy duty, and I wanna say it cost like 3 or 4 dollars to make one. 

Materials: 

• 2 plates, bowl and plate, coffee cup and saucer.... whatever you you wanna use is fair game. I get mine at dollar Tree or a thrift shop, lets keep it cheap! 
• 1/4 inch piece of all thread rod... get a few feet so you'll have extra for multiple feeders.
• 4 nuts and 4 washers to fit the all thread rod
• You can use a piece of copper tubing to hide the rod, its really your choice.
• Lastly I would recommend some silicon or some type of water sealant to put on the washers, once you tighten everything down. Just to keep water from leaking into the bird seed.
• All you will need as far as specialty tools are a drill, a small hacksaw, and glass and tile drill bits to drill through the glass or porcelain. (use some water on the base of the dishware while drilling, it keeps the bit from over heating.

I am not going to go into a compleat explination of every step, becaue I feel like it's pretty self explanatory from the pictures. Although if anyone out there does need a step by step, leave a comment and I will edit the post to add the steps.

So yeah that's really it, this is super easy  project and it only take about 15 minutes to make a nice looking feeder to hang outside a window or off a deck.

Thanks for reading and as always never stop creating.

  

Again Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed the post!

Feedback

          Hey guys, I wanted to ask anyone out there whose reading my blog if you could take a minute and give me some feedback. This could be about anything you want, if you like a project I've done, wanna see a specific project, or know a better way to do something, hell if I need to be corrected because I don't know what I'm talking about, please leave a comment.

The reason I'm asking this, is because I really don't know who is reading this and I wanna know, or at least an idea of who my audience is. Are you a Pintrest junkie like me, or a weekend DIY warrior, or do you just like the pictures. Anyway all any positive or negative feedback will do is boost my confidence with the blog and  keep me blogging more regularly. And yes, I wanna hear the negative stuff too, growth is not always achieved by kind words.

The thing with blogging and anyone who knows me can verify this, is I hate writing! It is actually really difficult but also rewarding for me to sit and write these post. So yeah I just wanna make sure I'm heading in the right direction.

Thanks everyone, and as always never stop creating! 
        
       Also, I know the the title of my blog is Sawdust and Hops. I haven't posted anything about home brewing beer yet, and I'm sorry for that. Its coming tho, I am in the process right now of gathering materials to build a gravity tower for an all grain system. My hope is once my all grain system is operational I will be brewing more often. Extract brewing can be pretty expensive, and switching to all grain will reduce the cost considerably. 

New Handles for a Drawknife and Chisel.

        A few weeks ago I picked up an old drawknife and chisel blade at an antique shop. they were both in pretty bad shape but the price was right so I couldn't resist. The drawkinfe is a tool I have been keeping my eye out for months, so unless it was completely rusted in half, I was gonna buy it. They were both heavy rusted and after cleaning them both with a wire wheel, they showed promise. The chisel cleaned up nice with no pitting in the steel, the same thing couldn't be said about the drawknife. It was heavily pitted, but for my needs it will serve no issue. For my first attempt at replacing handles in already existing tools, I think I did a pretty good job.  

I wish I would have snapped some pictures of them before I cleaned them up, i'm really bad about keeping my blog in mind when I start a project. Especially when its a small project like this... I'll work on it. I didn't take any pictures of the process I used with the chisel, I really wish I would have because I don't own a wood lathe, and I shaped it by hand. This is something I'm really going to work on. 

I hope you enjoy the post and pictures, and as always Never Stop Creating!

    

Wood Carving Knife

          Lately I have been playing around with wood carving, and looking in to carving tools,  knives, gouges, draw knifes etc...  At the same time I have also been wanting to try my hand at making a knife, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I took a blacksmith class a few years back where I  made a knife from a railroad spike. So even though I have never really tried my hand at knife making since then, I knew the basic principles from the previous class.
 This knife is primarily a wood carving knife, I cloned the design from a Mora 106 knife blade. All in all I thought it turned out pretty good for my first shot out the gate. I made the blade from an old chop saw blade I had laying around, and the handle from some left over oak scraps, the sheath is from some scrap leather. So even though this is knife and sheath are not perfect or works of art, they are functional and serve my desired purpose, and that is what really maters.

I hope you enjoy the post, and as always never stop creating!
Thanks.

Silk Screen Board

Last semester I took a silk screen class, that I really enjoyed. While looking in to the supplies needed to make a screen board, I realized I could make due with supplies I had laying around my work bench. There is really nothing special about this project, and the only reason i'm even writing about it, is because buying the clamps online can be pricey. Technically this project was zero cost for me, but if you were gonna buy supplies you would need a piece of plywood,  2 cheap C clamps, a scrap 1x2, 2 cheap door hinges, and some screws. Now this is not a tutorial on the process of silk screening, its just an idea for the screen board, and the image I used in the photos was not my original design.

Sorry for the blurry pictures, I took these with my phone. Anyway all this is, is a way to lift the silk screen so you can swap out paper, shirts, or what ever your printing on. If you notice I cut a section out of the back of the plywood. That is so the C clamps have room to clear the board.

I'll I did was attach the 1x2 to the hinges, and then clamp the silk screen frame to the 1x2. Like I said this was a super easy project, but is your in to or getting in to silk screening this is a quick project that works just as good as the 15-20 dollar clamps. 

I'll post a few pictures of my prints, to give you an idea of the kind of things you can do. When I took this class it was my first introduction in this medium, so if your a silk screener don't be to critical. Silk screen is a crazy cool process, and if you ever get the chance I highly recommend taking a silk screen class.  

These pictures are gonna be a little out of order, I guess I didn't take pictures of all the steps.... whoops

SO AS I ALREADY STATED THIS WAS NOT MY ORIGINAL DESIGN. But never the less they turned out super cool. 

Well I hope this helped a few people that need an idea fulfilled. As always thank you for looking at the page and please share the photos on Facebook or Pintrest, it helps me out with getting foot traffic on the page,

Thanks!

Keggle Mash Tun

Hey, so its been months since my last post. That doesn't mean I haven't been busy though. I'm going to try and pay more attention to the blog this year. I've been an extract home brewer for about a year and a half, and finally wanted to get my hands in to all grain brewing. All grain is just cheaper per recipe and it allows for more personal input of your beer.  A buddy of mine had a keg laying around his place, and was nice enough to part with it.

Now a mash tun can be made out of all sorts of things, coolers, pots, and kegs. The reason I went the keg rout was because I prefer metal over plastic, its easier to clean and it will last forever.

So the first step is to release the pressure inside the keg, this accomplished by pushing straight down  on the ball valve. I would recommend placing a rag over the ball to keep stale beer from spraying you in your face. After the pressure is released you can do one of two things. 1 is to use a screwdriver to pry out the retaining ring, this can be a pain in the ass. 2 is to use your angle grinder to make a cut s to split the ring in half, this makes it very easy to pop the ring out. You don't need the top anyway as your about to cut a big hole in the top.

Once the dip tube is removed, make a circle around the top with a marker. I used the lid off my 5 gallon kettle as a template, although I did make it slightly smaller so I could use the lid on the keg, I think it was 11 inch diameter. Your gonna want to use stainless steel cutting discs on your grinder, I barley used a quarter of an inch of my disc.

Just go slow, there is no rush. Once the top drops, take a file and some sandpaper to the cut edge and smooth out the edge. Be careful metal splinters suck!

Next step is to install the valve, this is just as simple as drilling a home and tightening down the valve nuts. I'm not going to go in to great detail about this step because its really simple.

Just make sure you don't make the hole to big, because if you do your in for some extra work to correct the mistake. I suggest picking up a caliper at Harbor Freight for $3, Trust me you'll use it more often than you'll think.

Go slightly smaller, and ease it to the right size.

Pre-drill a hole to make the bores work a lot easier.

If your using a valve from a brew shop, its pretty standard install. 

And last but not least, do leak check and that's it.

So you might have noticed I didn't install a filter, and there is a few inches from the drop tube and the bottom of the keg. I still have some fine tuning to do before I cook up a batch.  I opted out of a false bottom, so I will do an update when I put on the filter.

Thanks for reading and looking at the page, I hope you got something out of it.

Celtic mash paddle

This was a project I did a while back and am just now getting around to posting pictures of it. This project was a lot of fun, for one I have never dabbled in wood carving before and it gave me a reason to try my hand at making mosaic pins. So a Mash paddle is a tool used in brewing beer (is basically a big stir stick) I wanted to play around with a carving project and this gave me that opportunity. Typically a mash paddle is pretty basic, but whats the fun in being basic when you got skills right!

Because this was my first attempt at carving I used a softer wood (poplar) which I would have rather used oak or maple, but finding maple in Florida is damn near impossible. This paddle is more decoration than functional. Like I said I was looking more at the carving aspect that the practicality of the piece, but the next one I do will be oak.

I started out by laying down a pattern on a 3/4 board, then used a jigsaw to cut out the body of the paddle.

 Once the body was cut out, I drilled holes in each negative space on the knot section of the paddle. Then using a copping saw I cut out each negative space. This part takes a while so don't get frustrated.

After a rough sanding to clean up the edges and crevices, next is time to break out the chisels. Now I would not recommend using carpenters chisels but if that's all you got I'm sure you can pull it off with some fineness and patient. What I would recommend are carving chisels, you will have more versatility than you will with a straight edge chisel.

To get the affect that the wood is knotted, I dug down a 1/4 inch or so on the parts that would give it a uniformed weaved affect. It sounds more difficult than it is, the hardest part of doing a Celtic knot is making sure its consistent.

After I was satisfied with the knot work I carved a Scottish thistle in the handle, and because this is not a functional piece I used a not food grade stain. If this was a functional paddle I would have used a butcher block stain that is food grade or I would have just used mineral oil.  

  
I was really happy with the final product and would defiantly make another. As always I hope you enjoyed the post, if you have any feedback feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!

Remember, all that makes a person an expert in a craft is practice!

Thanks.