Sledge Hammer Repair

As you may recall, I recently had to bust up a big block of concrete in the back yard. To accomplish this task I was borrowing a sledge hammer from my landlord. As it turned out the handle of the sledge had a small crack in it that started to become a major crack after a few hours of pounding on concrete.I wrapped the handle up with some duct tape and it held together perfectly through the rest of the job. It seemed to be a completely functional repair, but I felt bad returning the tool in this condition so I decided to do a proper job of repairing the handle.

To start, I got a new handle from the hardware store that was supposed to the designed for the size head that I was working with. It turned out that it was not quite the right size, so I had to cut it shorter.

Now the head could seat all the way onto the top of the handle.

The next adjustment I needed to make was to the width of the handle. No amount of pounding and pushing could get this handle even half way into the hammer head so after some research, I learned that one is meant to trim the handle so it can fit inside the head. I approached this task carefully not wanting to remove too much material, so I put a sanding bit into my rotary tool and took off a little at a time. I tried putting it back into the head often to make sure I didn't take off too much wood and took note of the high points that were getting stuck so that I could contour the end of the handle to the inside of the head. I stopped when I got it to a point it didn't easily go on, but seemed that with a bit of effort it would be able to.

You can see here, that the wood looks a little darker than before. I used mineral oil lubricate the inside of the head and was then able to get the handle all the way through. The next step was to drive a wooden wedge into the slot in the top of the handle. The first thing I had to do was trim the wedge down to the width of the handle.

It turned out to be very difficult to pry the slot in the handle open again to get the tip of the wedge in there. I ended up pounding a razor blade into it and subsequently widening it with pry bar. Once I did get the tip of the wedge in, it was trivial to drive it all the way down. I was able to use the weight of the hammer head to my advantage here and just pounded it straight down against the floor of the garage.

Ok... we're almost there. I cut off the part of the wedge that stuck out so it was now flush with the top of the handle.

The last step is to drive in a steel hammer wedge perpendicular to the wooden wedge. At this point the wood flares out in all directions above the hammer head so I'm pretty confident that it's not going anywhere. This certainly wasn't the easiest fix

Big Whiteboard for Garage

This project is one that was inspired by the availability of a material that seemed too good to pass up. It all started when I was browsing on the website of a wonderful little place called ReSource. They receive reclaimed building materials from demolition project, scraps from construction, or other donations and sell them a a great price. Everything from light fixtures and sinks to cabinets, doors, tile, fasteners, lumber and then all of the random other things that come through. At the moment I was checking their hours so I could go and pick up some lumber for a bed, but came across a posting that they had received some old chalkboards and whiteboards from a school that was being renovated. I got extremely excited about the prospect of having a chalkboard in the garage for keeping things organized and doing big thinking. I thought a little bit about where it could go, and realized that the only free wall space was the garage door itself.

The governing design principle was that a point at the top and bottom of the garage door are at their furthest when the door is open. During the course of opening and closing, those two points will get closer but never further, so as long as I mount the chalkboard in a way that can compress, it will work well. What I came up with was to mount it to the top of the door with hinges, and then tie it down to the bottom with rope so that it would be tight when the door was down but allowed to hang down a little as the door went up and down.

When I got down to ReSource, I was crushed when I discovered that they had already sold all of the chalkboards they had gotten. They did still have some whiteboards, but I really had my heart set on a chalk board. After a little stewing, I started to come around to the idea of a whiteboard. For one thing, a 4' x 8' slab of slate would weight a ton and probably be too heavy for the garage door to lift. Secondly, although the chalkboard has a certain classic aesthetic that I found very attractive, a whiteboard is really quite practical and wouldn't have the issue of chalk dust. Additionally, I could then use it to project films or something on the garage wall... cause I do that a lot.

Anyways, I got over my disappointment and decided to go with the whiteboard. They had a bunch of 12' ones, but this 8 footer seemed plenty big enough for my purposes as well as being far easier to transport. I also picked up some lumber, lag screws and the hinges for this project as well as a window for a project that you will read about in a month or so. The kicker is that I got it all $5! Not bad. After a little cleaning, it looked good as new.

I cut the 2" x 4" down to length so I could run one down each side of the whiteboard.

Here's the board mounted to the planks and leaning against the garage door.

There's a few horizontal lengths of aluminum channel stock running along the garage door that would prevent the whiteboard from laying flat against it. Therefore, I had to mount the hinges on blocks to suspend the board out from the door a few inches.

Once I had the blocks on the door in the appropriate places, I mounted the hinges onto the tops of the two side planks with the heavy lag screws I had picked up at ReSource.

It ended up being pretty tricky to get the board exactly into place while I attached the hinges to the door. I had to set it up on to two folding chairs and the shim the height with some cardboard boxes. Once it was in place, I clamped and drilled my holes and then screwed it into the blocks.

The right one was a little easier, because the plank I picked up for the left side was pretty warped. But it worked just fine.

Here you can see the whiteboard in action. It runs even smoother than I had imagined.

There's the finished product! As you can see I've already started using it to plan my next project. On the right side I've attached a little bucket to hold the markers and eraser that swivels when the door goes up so they don't fall out.

B-icicle

We finally got a little bit of winter. I had a blast riding around in all that snow, but it was so deep that I seriously considered skiing to work. It was the first time I encountered conditions where I actually would have been more efficient on skis than a bike.

The problem with all that snow is that the bike gets all caked up with snow and frozen slush. I bring the bike into the garage at night but on nights like this, it doesn't get above freezing in there so I need to find some way to melt off the snow.

I used to use a hair dryer, but that was awkward and inefficient. I needed something that would melt down the whole bike and not require me to be there to reposition it and turn it off. I got a cheap little space heater with a fan for about $20 and found a timer switch for it (pictured below).

Now I just throw the bike up on the stand and set up the heater blowing warm air onto the bike for 2 or 4 hours (I left it for 4 in this case). In the morning all the snow is gone. All that remains is a little sandy residue from the salt and dirt in the slush. I just wash that off with a little cleaner and a rag and the bike is happy as a clam!

Homemade Newsprint Pad

Happy Pi Day!

This post concerns a large pile of newsprint I aquired as waste from the relocation of several refrigerators at work. The freezers and refrigerators had been stuffed full of news print so that they could be moved without being emptied. I didn't know exactly what I was going to use the newsprint for, but I knew I could do better than just recycling it, so I took it home. It sat in an awkward roll in my garage for a few months before I was finally motivated to come up with a better way to store it. I decided to make a pad out of it.

For some reason, there is an extensive collection of yard sticks lying around the house, so I didn't feel bad about committing one of them to becoming the spine of the newsprint pad. I lined up the top off each page along the yard stick.

I bound the stack to the yard stick with staples.

There's the finished product. I've mostly been using it to sketch out designs or record ideas, but it's much easier to store this way.

Extension Cord Management

I keep a 25' extension cord around for things like my drill that have short plugs on them. The problem is that I use it so often that it's a big pain to coil it back up and put it away each time.

I put a little hanging hook (like the ones I use to hang bikes) under my work bench and leave the extension cord plugged in and coiled onto it. This is kind of like the fancy retractable ones that you can buy for lots of money... without a complicated mechanism to break.

Twine Dispenser

I decided it would be great if I had a little twine dispenser on my work bench so I could quickly get a segment for all of the many little things it might get used for.

I got a 1/2" x 6" hex bolt to serve as the spindle


I used my 1/2" paddle bit to bore a hole in one of the wall studs in front of my work bench. [When I started the upper hole, I was unpleasantly surprised by a nail so I had to try again]

I poked the bolt through and added a washer to go between the twine spool and the stud.

Next I added the twine and another washer

Because I wasn't going to tighten the bolt down very hard, I applied some thread locker so that it would stay put once I had it to the right position. The idea is that it should be tight enough so the dispenser doesn't wobble, but shouldn't create friction to make it difficult to pull twine out.

The nut is only finger tight

I used a little angle joist hanger as the guide for the dispenser

Here's the finished product in place. I might mount a little razor blade on that corner so I don't have to pull out a knife to cut it each time I want some. My original idea was essentially a big dental floss dispenser anyways.

Color Coding Tools

I had the same problem that faces many folks using tools, especially in a bike shop: the 14mm and the 15mm box wrench look the same from a quick glance.

The simple solution is one made famous by Sheldon Brown. A 5-color system gives wrenches a color based on their size in mm. Because only 5 colors are used to label more than 5 sizes of wrench, the mod 5 value of the wrench size is used.
0 = red
1 = white
2 = yellow
3 = green
4 = blue
For example, 13 mod 5 = 3 so the 13 mm wrench is green in my system. For more detail on the mod operator, see this link.

I also color-coded the hooks to make it even easier to get my wrenches back to their appropriate hooks, especially when I have more than one down at a time.

Ahhh... much better. This is particularly helpful for double ended wrenches (of which I own none).

It looks great and really does streamline things when you're working. More than 5 colors is unnecessary because it's easy enough to tell a 10mm wrench from a 15mm even if they're not next to each other. I think I'm going to get about labeling my allen keys next.

Pin Spanner

I busted my pin spanner working on a freewheel a few months ago.

Fortunately, they make the actual pins replaceable. You just need a 4mm allen wrench to take it out.

I would have done it sooner, but it took me until last week to get my hands on a replacement. None of the local shops seem to carry these.

Et voilà. Now I can go back to hacking apart freewheels.

Wall Storage Ropes

I struggled to find a good place to store my skis and other long skinny objects that was secure and out of the way but still easily accessible when needed. I usually just leaned them up against the wall between two wall studs, but I decided that a more secure arrangement would be needed. To that end I decided to string up some rope between the wall studs so I could slip these tall narrow objects behind without fear of their falling.

I used my staple gun to tack the rope down. After shooting the staples in, I pounded them in a little more with a hammer to make sure that the rope would hold. For the ends I did 3 staples on the front and then tucked the end around the corner with 3 more for good measure.


To help keep the rope from sliding at the middle positions, I threw in a little overhand knot between the staples. I couldn't really hit those ones directly with the hammer because the knot got in the way. To circumvent this little issue, I placed my pry bar over the staples and then hit that with the hammer. It worked well.

Finished product:

Bike Stand

When I was getting my workshop set up, one of the first things I knew I wanted to add to it was a bench-mounted bike repair stand. I had toyed with the idea of just buying one, but they're pretty darn expensive so the clear solution was to build. I had seen the mechanism I knew I wanted in a stand made by Park Tool, but I didn't know if I would find such a clamp for my use. Fortunately, I'm just down the street from what may be the world's finest locally and independently owned hardware store. As I've now come to expect from the excellent people at McGuckin Hardware, not only did they have the exact piece of hardware to meet my obscure need; I now know that it's called a toggle clamp and they had 6 or 8 different kinds and sizes.

I started by mounting a piece of 2" angle steel (scrap from a modification to my trailer) to the corner of my bench. To that I mounted the toggle clamp, but I had to raise it up on a little block of synthetic 2x6 so that it would accommodate the thickness of a top tube. The little rubber stopper bolt can be adjusted a bit to fit different sized tubes. To cradle the top tube below the clamp I put a half section of pipe.


This is a short galvanized steel coupler about 1 1/2" in diameter cut lengthwise with a hacksaw. The hardest part was mounting the round pipe securely to the flat bar. I put two holes through and used hardened flat-head machine screws and lock nuts. To contour the shape of the screw heads, I tried to taper the holes a little. This helped to get a tight fit, and it turned out not to be a huge deal because the stand doesn't receive much force perpendicular to the axis of the bike. Then to protect the bike from scratches I glued in a half section of thick vinyl tubing with Goop for a tough bond that could withstand some wiggling and impact.


And there's the stand with my bike

The stand works well for bikes with a standard flat top tube that have thinner tubing. My road bike has fat carbon framing and has trouble fitting into the stand. Because I ride the track bike most of the time, it's the one that mostly needs maintenance so the lack of versatility hasn't been a huge problem. I've started to think about other designs that would be more flexible but the only major change in this design would be a wider pipe to accommodate fatter tubes. There's no real danger of going too wide because as long as it's curved it will cradle a round tube. In retrospect it would have been much better to error on that side. The other design flaw I've found is the inability of the angle steel to resist torque. It doesn't make it way harder to work on the bike, but it is annoying to have it bobbing in a see-saw motion around the clamp point. I don't think that a square or round tube would have this problem. I may still reinforce the current arm with a square piece which I expect to greatly attenuate the torsional flexibility. Nonetheless, this stand has made a dramatic change in the ease with which I maintain and clean my bikes which means that I perform those tasks far more often. The materials cost me less than $20 so all things considered, it's pretty sweet.

Handlebar Hangers

I have a variety of different bar/stem combos that I swap off my track bike from time to time. In organizing my garage I was looking for a good way to store the ones I wasn't currently using. Because of their awkward shape and the fact that the stems are covered in grease, I decided that just putting them on a shelf would be insufficient. I decided to turn to one of my oldest favorite building materials: the coat hanger. I just made a little loop that hangs off the 2 x 4 rafters in my garage and tacked it in place with a few shots from my staple gun to keep it from sliding around as I put bars on or take them off.

The hanger

In place

Nicely out of the way until I need them