Sawdust
It was a simple addiction at first. A few pieces of furniture here and there soon progressed to remodeling two houses and building one from scratch. Tool purchases can always be justified: you just have to find a project for them!
All posts by Tom
Rocking Horse
Another long ago furniture project. When my boss’ son was born back in 1992, I made this rocking horse for him out of a pallet that a large CNC machine was delivered on. The main runners of this pallet were some 8×12″ red oak timbers. After re-sawing and planing, this beautiful wood emerged from the oil soaked pallet.
Desks and Dressers
As I look back I realize that before we went to China and took up photography as a sort of hobby, we had not taken pictures of many of the projects that I built. And even where we had a picture of the finished project we didn’t take the in-process photo records that you see for many of my metalworking projects. In future I’ll try to be sure to do that, but for now I’ll just show a couple of pictures that I have handy right now.
Seat Heater
This is a write-up that I did for a local Miata club website back around ’99 or 2000. It includs the schematics but only a few photos, I didn’t take nearly as many back then as I’ve done for more recent projects. And, although the voice here is written as a set of instructions it has been a long time since I wrote this so use anything entirely at your own risk! Here’s the original write-up:
Keyless Entry Modification for Miata
This is another write-up from back when I was making various modifications to my ’99 Miata. For this project I modified an installation of a Duetto Motors keyless entry unit, which I added because they didn’t come with the car back then. Here’s the article as written:
Trunk Light
’99 Miata Trunk Light Modification
Back in 1999 I wrote up some instructions to help other Miata enthusiasts make a minor change to their cars, for less than $8 and about two hours of time, which I thought made a worthwhile improvement to the car design. I’ve included a copy of my instructions below if anyone is interested in how I made this modification.
Gate
Compared to our CT house, our house in MA has even more ragged old White Pines that need clearing. I haven’t yet had a chance to get really started, but I did take one dead tree down recently when I needed to build a section of rail fence to act as a gate in the stone wall. After cutting and setting posts to match the mailbox post that I made, I needed a 14 ft section of rail to fill the gate opening. This is far longer than the split rails available at the store but there was a simple solution.
Datsun Roadster
I’ve always been a car guy, but unfortunately haven’t always thought to take photos of my cars. I don’t have any pictures of the little Honda Trail 70 motorcycle that I rode all over Glenrose Texas when I was 8, or of the bigger Suzuki 90 that I graduated to when I was 12. And I really wish I’d taken a few pictures of my first car, a Datsun Bluebird sedan, which I bought for $25 when I was 15. I had to rebuild the transmission which was a great lesson for a kid to learn.
While I was in college and working part-time in a machine shop I bought a beat-up, non-running car, this Datsun Roadster. I built it an engine with the help of my brother and dropped it in, painted and finished it myself, and drove it for several years. Wish I had some photos of the process, and a better picture of the end result!
Mini Baja 1982 Team
The University of Texas at Arlington fielded two teams for the national Mini Baja design-build engineering competition in 1982. That’s me third from the right, on the 3-person team.
Our team captured first place in the national competition that year, which was held at Texas Tech in Lubbock. The girl on our team at the far right is Lisa, my future, current, and forever wife, so you can see that joining the team had far-reaching consequences!
Here are some photos from our 1982 competition. You can see the desert terrain in Lubbock, lots of dust, sand, and rocks. Mini Baja college team competitions are still held yearly.
SAE Race Team 1984
After being part of the Mini Baja Engineering Team competition in 1982 I jumped at the chance to join the Society of Automotive Engineers Competition Team at the University of Texas at Arlington for the 1984 competition, which was held at our school that year.
Like the Mini Baja, this was a design, build, and race competition, and, need I say it, our team won first!
I even got the wheels off the ground in a few of the turns! Here are a couple of race pictures and a few close-ups of the car:
