Korey Atterberry’s Idle Chatter

A week ago, I spent the day in the garage doing some woodworking. I was using the table saw, miter saw and router table, creating a lot of dust. For my health, I hooked up the shop vac to the tools to collect the saw dust.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the results. The brand new filter in my shop vac quickly filled with fine sawdust. As soon as that happens, the suction drops off dramatically.

After a little bit of research online, I built a cyclone dust separator:

This contraption sits inline with the shop vac removes most of the sawdust and wood chips before they reach the vacuum’s tub or filter. It cost about $25 to build and despite my careless engineering and construction it works perfectly!

Visit the project page for more details.

A couple of days ago, a friend and I were talking about putting extra weight in our pickup truck beds for added traction for winter driving. I’ve usually put a few hundred pounds of concrete blocks back there, but the problem is storing those blocks when not in use. I have to carry them out to the shed, which isn’t fun.

We came up with the idea of using ice, since it packs a fair amount of weight into a small space, it’s easy to load (use a hose), requires no room to store, and is even easier to unload (it just melts when it warms up).

One way that would probably work would be a use a tarp or piece of plastic sheet to trap some water in the bed and let it freeze in place. I didn’t have any handy, nor could I think of an easy way to keep it in a small space, so I used another approach.

I had a stack of 5 gallon buckets that kitty litter came in, so I filled them with water and let them sit for a couple of days. In about two days (around 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside) they were frozen solid. I turned them over and without too much trouble the ice slid out of the buckets. The picture above shows 7 buckets worth, which is around 300 pounds. Over the axle would be most effective, but the front of the bed works too, and leaves me more useful room in the bed.

For several years we’ve been buying the 18-gallon Sterilite plastic storage totes. They’ve offered the same grey tubs (item #1815) for years, and we’ve bought dozens of them. They sell for around $4 and are roughly 24 inches long, 18 inches wide, and exactly 15-3/8 inches tall. Because of this de facto standardization, I’ve built wooden shelves in my garage, in the basement and in most of our closets specifically sized for these tubs, with 16 inch spacing between the shelves for optimal storage efficiency. Almost everything we store is in these tubs.

About a week ago, I bought a bunch more since we’re doing some organizing. Tonight I went to put a tub of out-of-season clothes on one of the shelves and got a nasty surprise: the tubs have been slightly redesigned and are 3/4 of an inch taller. The lid is identical to the old model, and the stated capacity is still 18 gallons, but it’s now taller than my shelves. D’oh…

I’ve got a lot of shelves built for these tubs, probably about 40 tubs of storage capacity. My choices are to take the new tubs back and HOPE to find some (read: a lifetime supply) of the old ones, or do a ton of shelf rebuilding. I checked on Walmart’s website, and there are still some in stock, but not within 50 miles. Shipping is a possibility, but it’s a little pricey.

I guess there is a third choice: a grassroots effort to get Sterilite to return to the old design. Hopefully this inconsequential blog post, along with the nearly dozen people who will likely read it, will do the trick…

In the past I’ve written about Google Documents, and the importance of backing up your data. I just discovered that Google added the ability to export all of your documents at once, so you can keep a local backup of all your files!

Here’s a article that describes how to do it.

Google Docs Finally Makes It Easy to Download All Your Documents