Building a Cajon

A cajon is a simple percussive instrument which resembles an innocuous wooden box. Despite it's simple appearance, it can produce a wide variety of sounds depending on where and how it's hit. An internal snare and a loose tapa (the striking surface) further adds to the variety.

I thought I would put my table saw to a good (and first) use, and try building one!

Magnetic Hooks

Magnetic hooks tend to be rather useful - as a lot of workshop surfaces tend to be metal. 

An easy, but effective one can be made in a few minutes using a spare rare earth magnet from a hard drive. 

These come with a convenient backing plate, so it's a matter of finding a suitably sized screw, and bending it into a hook. 

Jet JPM-13CS Thicknesser

A new addition to the workshop - a Jet JPM 13CS 13" Thicknesser / Moulder.

I put it through a fairly standard reconditioning procedure, which involved:

• Removing all guards and cleaning all accessible surfaces with ethanol / degreaser.
• Removing old lubricant and grime from the guide posts and the lead screwsand flushing the bearing surfaces several times with clean oil. 
• Greasing the leadscrews and oiling the guideposts.  
• Replacing stripped fasteners.
• Setting of cutterhead and roller heights. 
• Setting the drive belt tension.

It is interesting the types of problems that you find in the process... but the final result was worthwhile - a clean quiet machine, that produces a smooth planed surface, and makes less noise than the dust extractor! 

Doweling Jig

I needed a jig to help my drill 8mm holes in the ends of hardwood boards for my Outdoor Table. These holes needed to be accurately spaced, otherwise assembly would be difficult if not impossible. 

I started with a piece of 80x20mm mystery steel bar. (It later turned out to be a really fairly hard tool steel!) The bar was milled on all sides to 70x18x22mm. 

Router Fence

A router table is useful for profiling, rabbeting, dadoing, and a whole variety of other things. I find though that most of my router work has thus far has been on edges (eg. radiusing, rabbeting, etc).

I built a router fence to allow me to make rabbets, to make edge rounding easier.

Circle Cutting Jig

I needed to cut a 120mm circle for the back board of my cajon. I didn't want to shell out $50+ for a hole cutter that I would use once. Had the hole been smaller, I could've used my existing set, or had it been much larger, I could've used the existing fence attachment on the router and put an adjustable pin in it. But unfortunately, it was neither.

Here's how I did it.... 

W.I.P. - Garage Door Seal

Dust and leaves tend to blow into my garage through the gaps in the garage door. Anything stored near the garage door also has a penchant for rusting easier, presumably due to larger swings in humidity and temperature leading to condensation. In an ongoing effort towards a cleaner workshop, this gap had to be sealed.

W.I.P. - Curtain

W.I.P. = Workshop Improvement Project

My workshop has a small alcove, which is currently home to all the "dirty" equipment - sandblaster, surface grinder, bench grinder, air compressor, and eventually, the welder. The sandblaster is a particularly bad offender - every time it is used, the house floors get a fine coating of abrasive dust...and the entry to the house is 3 corners and 2 doors away. A greater amount of dust undoubtedly ends up in the precision slideways and leadscrews of my machines.

A 50x25mm rolled hollow section was used as a curtain rail. This was anchored into the 2 walls forming on the sides of the alcove. (Note the stock rack on the left hand side - this can accommodate stock up to 3.5m long. It is made from 4 angle brackets dynabolted into the brick columns).

Outdoor Table

I have collecting (/hoarding) a lot of hardwood timber floorboards (thrown out by less enterprising individuals during council cleanup). It's time to get reclaim the lost space under my workbench and turn it into something useful - an outdoor table, in time for summer.

The plan is to build a parallel slat table. The rough layout can be seen below. The target size (wood supplies allowing) is 900x900mm, with a height of 750mm. Approximately 14 boards are required for the top surface.

Milling Machine

A collection of novel stuff

Rubik's Cube cake (home-made)

(Near) spherical cactus

Artificial chicken

High Speed Spindle for Milling Machine

Low spindle speeds are the bane of a home-shop machinist. Typical milling machine spindle speeds rarely exceed 2000 rpm for heavy duty geared machines. The top speed for my mill is 1250 rpm, which is great for boring large holes or facing big pieces of steel, but to machine a piece of aluminium at the typical 300 sfm requires a 20mm diameter cutter!

The spindle speeds are typically increased by changing the gearing / belt ratios, adding a "spindle speeder" (see below) or attaching an auxiliary spindle. A collection of good ideas can be found at CNC Cookbook. (The blog is also a great read).

I propose to modify my mill to have a high-speed spindle in a slightly unconventional way...

1 hour Robot

Presenting ... The 1-hour robot, made using some HobbyKing and eBay parts.

1 hour of building time yielded many hours of great fun!