Arbor, gate and fence

With the pizza oven and patio wrapping up,  it was time to fix all the damage I did to the lawn and regrade a few problem areas.  I rented a small stand behind skid steer and it worked well.

Since I was laying out all that money I figured I'd also rent the post hole attachment and dig holes for a fence and arbor (next years project). 

Turns out it was the wrong auger and I had to improvise an adaptor between the auger and the power head. Holes all were dug and patio blocks were placed as caps. We had a rain the next day and it became clear that the fence and arbor would be a sooner project rather than later.

Had some wonderful ideas on how to build it and they got shot down by my lovely bride.  She wanted low maintenance - and insisted on Vinyl.  I looked around the internet and found some really cool arbor kits but they were super expensive.  I downloaded the assembly manuals for a few and figured out how they were built and designed my own.  I found all the parts at Lowes and Home Depot except for the rafter ends.  The sides were a bit of a challenge - the top part is a deck rail section with shortened ballusters and the bottom rail is part of a gate kit.   I also used a gate kit to turn a section of fence into a gate.

Here it is all completed expect for the gate.  It turned out quite well if I say so myself.

Here is another view from the street - it was a challenge to make the fence appear at one level as the yard slopes slightly back.

Hardwood floors

My wife is allergic to some pet dander - in particular that hair and dander belonging to my cat and our newest dog. Our oldest dog, Bridge, I think I could rub her on my wife's face and not get a bit of a reaction. well, at least of the allergenic kind. I'm also pretty sure the dog would like it, too.

We ripped up the carpets in the bedroom and replaced with prefinished 3/4 inch tongue and groove white oak flooring to match the flooring in the rest of the house as much as possible.

I was not sold on the idea of using prefinished flooring - I remember how much bevel the edges of prefinished flooring used to have. They have something like a micro-bevel on the edges and it's barely noticeable after installation. on the plus side - I'd likely have to refinish the floors in later years or before we move as the dogs have done a bit of damage to the finish - at that time we could equalize any difference in finish (I hope).

The finish is good and I think it has better UV protection than the finish on my old existing flooring . The color match is not exactly right in all light levels (for me anyway).

There are two pics here looking in and out of the door and the color difference is not noticeable at all.

We did it ourselves in one killer weekend. That big pneumatic assisted Hammer/Stapler was awesome - one whack and the board was tight to the next and fastened (forever).

Since that worked out so well and we had wood left over we went on to put hardwood in the closet. That's when I found out my wife wasn't so happy with the layout of the closet and thought we should fix that before we put flooring around semi-functional built ins....

LED Lighitng Options

I've been building a patio off and on over the last 2 years. The project changed over that period and I decided to make concrete columns (I'll cover that in another entry). Then came with the problem of what to do with the columns?

First idea was to use simple 12V landscape ligating and have a small down light on the face of each column. Then I saw that a guy in Japan (of all places) put a single glass block in the side of his pizza oven stand. -- from that picture came the idea of using glass block to face the columns . This produced the need for some kind of internal lighting . I've caught the LED bug from my brother in law and found some great flexible strips with RGB LEDs mounted on them. After some experimentation I wrapped lengths around PVC pipe and will center them in each column. Here is a video of a much faster than normal color transition inside the column at night. It should look really nice out there. Next - synch the colors to the music!!!

Update - glass block is installed and lighting is in place.  I'll post a pic soon of all columns lit up!

Radio Mount for Triumph TR4

It has been a while since I started this project. I wanted to put a DIN mount radio where the original radio mounts. As with all the other modifications - it has to be reversible. So time to make a new mounting bracket and cut a hole out of it for the radio. Nah - never quite that simple. I also found out that when I drive the car without the brace installed I see significant movement between the dash and the transmission tunnel which means this bracket provides some rigidity for the body in addition to providing a place to mount the radio.

One of the guys on the Scions of Lucas mailing list sent me a drawing for the standard radio mount for a TR4. I made a full scale paper printout of it and it matched up quite well to the existing mount. I took the outline of the radio and drew it on to the paper - it was slightly larger than original bracket. Not Gonna work as it is. I needed to add some metal the the bracket to keep it reasonably strong.

Final solution is in the pics attached. I widened the mount and played with mounting hole dimensions and mounting hardware to get it to fit. Original bracket to dash mounting bolt heads were too tall and would not allow for radio frame to slide in the hole, so they were replaced with a low profile pan head fastener . Original fasteners were used for bracket to tunnel brace.

Been off the Blog quite some time

Quite a bit has been going on with the new job and it's taken a large part of my creativity to keep it going. I have not needed as much of a creative outlet to make gardens, work on cars, and projects.

Not to say there have not been projects going on.

I'll try and give some breif photo overviews on the projects over the past 2 years or so since I disapeared...