A couple of years back, I managed to pick up a nice railroad track anvil for just $6, and it was great for the metal I was working with. Somehow, on my trip down to California, it got lost in the move and I've been without a good pounding surface for a while.

Yesterday, I was driving through town and happened to see truck with a bunch of large pieces of scrap metal... including a 3-foot section of railroad track. I figured he was probably headed towards a scrap recycler, so I followed him a few miles until he pulled into a metal scrap yard. I hopped out and asked him if I could buy the track off of him before he dumped it, and after a quick bartering session, I walked away with a chunk of metal for $10.



Three feet is a bit long for my workspace, so cut it down with an oxy-acetylene torch (fun!).



I spent the rest of the morning building a workbench for myself, since I was using one of my kids' picnic tables as my work space. This was built entirely from scrap pieces of wood left over from a previous project. Eventually, I might build a larger workbench, but this will do for now.

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I've made two more shelves (one in my wife's garage, and two in mine), and I'm really starting to get the hang of it. In fact, with as many new houses as there are in my neighborhood, I'm thinking about going door to door and seeing if people want to buy my services to build custom shelves. Of course, doing it in this 3-digit heat doesn't sound like too much fun.



I also decided to try my hand at wall-mounted shelves. I'm using an old bookshelf that we didn't end up assembling after our move, and I like the way it's turning out. I can put regular shelves on the far side of my garage, but the near side has a wall that's nearly flush with the garage door opening, which means I don't have room for shelves to stick out at ground level. The solution is to hang the shelves above the height of my car.

Once this first one is done, I'll post more pictures.

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Back in 2002, I pulled together a bunch of 2x4s and OSB sheeting and constructed some garage shelves. Lots of them. Unfortunately, I had to leave them in Washington when we moved down to California, because they took up so much room. On the bright side, I had fun building them, so making new ones sounded like a fun project.

I chatted with my father-in-law (former home-builder), and he advised against the 2x4 construction on account of it costing more and taking up too much room. Instead, he suggested simply using plywood and cleats.



It took me a while to make the first one. It's more work, and it requires a lot of cutting. I used a circular saw to cut the shelves (16"x4') and the side wall (16"x7'), as well as the 16" and 46.5" 1x2 cleats. Normally, it wouldn't have been too bad, but it got up to 101 degrees today. Painful.

In any event, I'm impressed with how well it holds up. I was originally concerned that the shelves wouldn't be strong enough to hold much weight, but it looks like they'll work.

I'm also impressed with the price. That shelf in the picture ended up costing about $11, total. I've got plans to line my whole garage with these.

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One of the best DVD players I've owned is the Philips DVP 642 - it was one of the first inexpensive DVD players on the market to play DVDs, VCDs, SVCDs, DivX and Xvid video files, as well as MP3s. I picked it up back in 2005, and it's treated me fairly well, until recently. One day, it simply wouldn't do anything except display a blinking red light around the power button. Red ring of death, I guess.

Doing some research on it, it turns out that a common cause for this problem is a blown capacitor - a 10v 1000uf capacitor that ends up bulging out, possibly due to a voltage overload. The fix -- simply replace the cap with a 16v or greater 1000uf capacitor.

The DVD player comes apart with the removal of about 10 screws. Having cracked it open, it took me a while to find the culprit: capacitor C316 (labeled on the board). That's because the document I was reading said the capacitor would be near the power plug.


The problem was actually half-way down the board away from the power plug. I wonder if some of these DVD players have boards arranged differently.



Here's what a healthy capacitor looks like.



And here's the C316, bulging at the top.



Fortunately, a coworker of mine gave me a bunch of electrical components last year, and I've now got enough to compete with my local Radio Shack. I had a few 1000uf capacitors from which to choose.



Here's the 16v capacitor. It's a little larger than the 10v cap.



And here's the capacitor installed on the board.



Success!

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As long as I'm doing all this metal work, I figured it was finally time to build a workshop.


Here's the starting place for my metal workshop, with a bunch of lumber sitting there. The welding table is on the left, and the forge is there on the right. Until this picture, the welding table was on my covered deck, but I felt that the fire hazard right up next to my house wasn't a very good idea.


Here you can see that the work space is right there next to my chicken coop. Hope they don't mind the noise.


Next day, got some framing done. The main walls are 6-feet tall, and the taller sections are 8-feet tall. I have a taller section in there because I know that an overhead swing of my hammer will require a taller-than-6-feet ceiling.

... I noticed that it was awfully tall next to that fence. I asked my neighbor if it was going to be an eyesore, and he said he wouldn't mind. But then he said that he wasn't sure what his wife was going to think, so I decided to prevent a neighborly marriage crisis and move the frame. A dolly and a wife sure come in handy.


Here's the frame with some 4-foot walls next to my garden shed. I'm actually going to take over the garden shed (where else am I going to store my coal/charcoal?) and connect the walls somehow.


Here's the new welding spot. It's a little close to the doors on the shed (they swing out to open), but once the exterior walls are done, I'm not sure I'm even going to have doors on the shed. We'll see.


And here's the forge. Woo hoo.


Trusses up on the short-side of the workshop. Roof should go up in the next few days. And then I'm going to put up some aluminum screen over all the openings to keep cinders/ash from getting out. As for the interior, I'm probably going to use some thin sheet metal and cover all the exposed wood so there's little chance of everything going up in flames.


And now the entire roof is up, and much of the outside is painted. I haven't gotten all the windows screened up yet, and I still need to line the interior with sheet metal to keep it from burning down if any rogue sparks get away from my work.


Here's a shot of my welding area, viewed from the entrance of the smithy. At the moment of this writing, I actually haven't done any forging yet. I've been doing a lot of welding, so getting the welding area set up was my priority. As you can see, my welding "table" is actually three chunks of 4" square tubing that are pressed against each other (I'll weld the tubes together eventually) on top of some cinder blocks.


Here's a shot of the welding work space from behind my welding chair. I plan to do some reconfiguring of the space eventually, but everything seems to work well at the moment. All of my tools are within reach, and I'm protected against the elements. It's a fine workspace.

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