Drawer pulls

The drawer pulls we had built for us don't have an edge to hide any mistakes made when routing the holes they are placed in. It was very important to me that no mistakes be made since I was not going to build a whole new drawer. I also thought attempting to patch any mistake would not be acceptable. A custom form or a template was necessary to meet my goals.


My good friend Chris, who is an excellent craftsmen and has been taking classes at Red Rocks for many years, suggested I use a method he'd learned while in class. He said the method was used when a joint was required to fit exactly with another non-standard joint. The method involves Bondo and Petroleum Jelly.





To create the form/template, coat the object with Petroleum Jelly, mix the Bondo, place it around the object, and let it dry. The Petroleum Jelly prevents the Bondo from bonding with the object. It worked quite well for this project. Here's a picture of the template created by the hardened Bondo.



Removing the drawer pull from the hardened Bondo was quite easy. I drilled a hole in the back of the plywood and pushed the drawer pull out from behind. I didn't have to worry about damaging the drawer pull since it is made out of some hard metal.


Using a 1/2" bearing flush router bit, I created the custom templates I would use when routing the cabinet drawers.


Here's a picture of the front of a template with a drawer pull inside.

Here's a picture of the back a drawer pull inside the plywood template. Quite a nice fit!

After removing the hardened Bondo from the plywood with a hammer and sandpaper, I then routed the drawer faces using the three templates. It is difficult to make that first cut into something you've worked so long and hard on!


Here's an up close picture of the finished product. I'm really pleased how it turned out.


All three drawer pulls installed with drawers in the cabinet.



The next task for this project is the drawer front for the bottom drawer. My friend Chris will be helping me. I'll start this after main doors are installed. Thankfully that isn't my job.

Castlewood Canyon

Yesterday, some highschool buddies and I went hiking at Castlewood Canyon in Franktown CO. It's a hidden gem out in the plans southeast of CastleRock CO.



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We had to cross the stream a few times.






Here we are at the end of the trail.

TV is installed

 


The TV is installed in what may be its final resting spot. There is only about 1/2" clearance all the way around it.

More progress on the cabinet

Today I installed the last glass shelf and moved all our electronic components into the media cabinet. It is really starting to come together.

Joe M. should be coming out sometime to install the doors for the media cabinet. After that is done, then I can start on the front for the bottom drawer.

The drawer pulls still have to be installed too.

Hardware for the tall drawers

The media cabinet I've been working on has three tall drawers. There is about a 1/4" gap between them, not enough for little or big fingers to be able to open them easily.





We decided on using a recessed drawer pull, but we couldn't find one we both liked, so we went custom. One of the guys at the 23rd ave Sculpture Studio, John "Wild" Mann, created some drawer pulls for us based off of sketch I made.

Glass Shelving

I installed the 3/8" thick glass shelving in the media cabinet today. I have one more to do, but I need to have the shelf trimmed so it will fit nicely.

Entertainment Cabinet Continued

Over the past year, with my Dad's help, I've been building an entertainment cabinet. We purchased plywood from Austin Hardwoods in April 2011 and started construction. We made great progress over a week or so getting the general structure cut and built. Over the last 10 months I've been putting together the tall drawers, ironing on the edging to hide the plywood ends, and putting the finishing clear coat on everything. Just recently I've started installation.

Here are some pictures.

Empty Space



Bottom Drawer Only


Main Structure with a Tall Drawer


Bottom Drawer with Support


Top Shelf


Top Shelf with Fan and I.R. Repeater


Glass Shelving Support


VCR on a Glass Shelf


Glass Shelf with hole for cabling



Bottom of top shelf with holes for cabling


Wall Mount for TV

Generating Java code from a WSDL

Another java/web services post for yah. I recently had to generate some java code from a wsdl file to be able to access a webservice.

I used the axis2-wsdl2code-maven-plugin to accomplish this. Here's the pom file I created.

  4.0.0
  jalki-wsdl2java
  jalki-wsdl2java
  1.0-SNAPSHOT
  jalki-wsdl2java

  
      
          http://HOST:PORTS/CONTEXT/WEB_SERVICE_NAME?wsdl
      
  

  
      
          org.apache.axis2
          axis2
          1.4
      
      
          org.apache.ws.commons.axiom
          axiom-impl
          1.2.8
      
      
          wsdl4j
          wsdl4j
          1.6.2
      
  
  
      
          
              org.apache.axis2
              axis2-wsdl2code-maven-plugin
              1.4
              
                  
                      
                          wsdl2code
                      
                      
                          blah.blah.ws.client
                          ${WSDL_FILE_LOCATION}
                      
                  
              
          
      
  

With a simple invocation of "mvn clean install" this great plugin generates the client Java classes needed to interact with the web service.

Cap'n?

This is my Captain Crunch costume I made for the coed-kickball team I am a part of. The league hosts a couple theme nights, this time it was "product mascots."

Product Recall

I'd hate to be the one who first reported this issue...

Under Armour Recalls Athletic Cups Due To Injury Hazard

from US Consumer Product Safety Commission - Recent recalls and product safety news

The cups can break if hit, posing a risk of serious injury hazard to athletes.

The Shack

I just finished reading this book and I highly recommend it.

theshackbook.com/

Can you spot the bee?

Since we moved into our home I've planted a garden every year. I love growing sunflowers because they are very hardy and don't take a lot of work. Here's a photo of one of my first of the year. This is a red variety. Can you spot the bee?

Sun and Fun

in Hawaii...

Jeremy, Stephanie, Mom, Dad, Jennie and I spent some time together in Hawaii on the island of Kaua'i.

We surfed, snorkeled, rode bikes, went fishing, and enjoyed time together.

Bustin' down the lane

Jennie and I went bowling with her sisters Courtenay and Hannah recently.




We bowled three games together. I beat my previous high score of 215.

Bear Creek Lake Park

Today we took our first trip to Bear Creek Lake Park with our friend Bonnie.



View Map

Our first HD video posting

I finally was able to get some trial software to work so that I was able to transcode the m2ts (AVCHD) files created by our camcorder into an mpeg format. I used the trial version of Main Concept's AVCHD codec (H.264. They seem to be in the business of selling licenses to other companies so hopefully we'll see more support soon in other software. I then used the TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress software to deinterlace and transcode into mpeg-2.

Anyhow here's the video.



Horses in the corral from zac on Vimeo.

An amazing video

I'm still struggling to find a solution for editing the video files created by our new camcorder. There isn't a lot of support for editing the AVCHD format natively and the software that does support it often costs more than the camera.

I recently ran across an hd video someone had taken while paragliding. It is quite an exprience to watch it.


reNormalization from Marcin Kostur on Vimeo.

Another Home Video

Just playing around with the camera. This is a view of our corral to the west of the house.

GiSTEQ GPS Datalogger

For my birthday, Jennie gave me a GPS unit that came with software to set latitude and longitude values on pictures. It is able to do this fairly accurately if your camera's clock is synchronized with that of the GPS unit. Here's a great review of it: http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/gisteq-phototrackr-r1032.php



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Video from a Canon HG10

Here's the first video Jennie recorded with her new toy.




The camera records to a 40GB HDD using the nascent AVCHD format. There doesn't seem to be a bunch of support for editing or transcoding from this format.

With some help from http://chomer.com/how%2Dto/ I was able to figure out how to use the bundled software to transcode the .M2TS file produced by the camera into an AVI or a Quicktime file.

Executive Summary: Import your video file into a project in Ulead's DVD MovieFactory, then right-click the movie and select Export Video -> Customize. You can then choose a different file type such as .avi or .mov.

The video you see here is very dark and doesn't represent how the camera performs. I'm not quite sure why it turned out this way.