Archive for the ‘ Tools ’ Category

Folding Grill

I’ve gotten bored of trying to balance bits of old disposable BBQ on rocks when camping so I decided to make a folding grill.

The parts list is pretty simple -

  • 2m of 25x25x3mm Angle Iron
  • 2m of 25x15x3mm Angle Iron
  • 5m of 3mm steel rod
  • 300x300mm steel plate
  • 4 x nuts and bolts

This is also a good excuse for me to buy some new tools like a welder!

I did try to scrounge the parts for this but the scrap men have done a pretty thorough job of taking anything not bolted down so I had to buy most of it new.

Step 1

Cut 45 degree  mitre’s in the Angle Iron

plan

Step 2

Heat the bend points and slowly bend the metal.

Step 3

Weld the two corners of the Angle Iron together and weld the steel plate at one end. As you can tell by the picture this is the first time I have ever welded! I would have made the welder myself from microwave transformers but when you can buy them from eBay for £20 it’s not really worth it.

nasty-weldingwelder

Step 4

Cut the rods to length and weld them on.

Step 5

Grind down all of the nastyness and spray on some high tempreture BBQ paint.

painted

Step 6

Cut the legs to length and cut a notch in to one end so that they can hinge then drill the legs and frame and bolt it all together. I also added some cross bracing to the legs to stableize the whole thing.

finishedfolded

And your all done!

UPDATE!

Here it is in action

photo

Power over Ethernet Tester

Ever needed to see if a network point is live? Using POE? Then this might be able to help.

All it does is put the 48v from POE through a couple of power resitors to somthing  the LED’s can handle.  I’ve wired this up so it can deal with the proper POE standard and the Cisco standard.

Unfortunatlly it doesn’t seem to work with all Cisco routers but it passed some time making it!

Google Reader Un-Read Feed

After an intense google-fu workout session ending in failure I may be the only person in the word interested in doing this but here goes…

Use Google Reader? Want an RSS feed of only unread item? Then hears how!

The secret is subtraction, you need to take your reading-list feed and remove all items with a read tag.

As an example here’s what the reading-list and read feed url’s should look like

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/YOURUSERIDGOESHERE/state/com.google/reading-list

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/YOURUSERIDGOESHERE/state/com.google/read

Too find out your user ID go to reader.google.com and then enter this line of javascript into the address bar

javascript:prompt(“User ID”, _USER_ID);void(0);

you should then get a popup with your ID

So to get the unread feed you put it all together like this

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/YOURUSERIDGOESHERE/state/com.google/reading-list?&xt=user/YOURUSERIDGOESHERE/state/com.google/read

So now I’ve got the Vista RSS Feed gadget (running on XP just to be awkward) displaying a list of my unread items.

Yay!