Monday, March 26, 2007

Step 1 to becoming a cheap bastard

My townhome community has its own yahoo group and an interesting post appeared the other day. One of the members was complaining that after setting her trash out on the curb the night before trash pickup day, she would find her trash can would be overflowing with more trash the following morning. It seems like some of the residents won't spend the $25/mo and would rather let their neighbors pick up the tab.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

My future workbench

I'm planning to move my hobbies down to the garage (apparently the dining room table is for eat on) so I starting scoping out a place in the garage to fit a workbench. Shopping online didn't turn up anything that would make good use of the space I had so, I figured, why not build my own?
First things first, I had to design it. Most engineers would immediately start up their CAD program, but I didn't want the fork over a couple grand on a overly complicated program that would take me a week to use. Luckily it turns out that Google makes a program thats FREE called
SketchUp that does exactly what I want. One of the neat features is that you can upload your models to share them with all the other SketchUp users. Here's the file for my workbench. Notice that I have casters on the outside. There's a hinge on the wooden flap attached to the casters that allows the wheels to flip up when the table is lifted. This makes the casters extend below the legs of the table, hence movable. When you're done, flip the wheels back and you got 4 sturdy legs to stand on again.