Showing posts with label Hacked. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hacked. Show all posts
My neighbour owns a Mitsubishi Starion which he's doing up as a drift car. Part of this work involves stripping the interior of useless things like sound-proofing and passenger seats, and he was going to take this to the tip. He let me have it for nothing, since it was useless to him and also covered in primer overspray from when he'd been doing some bodywork. I cleaned up as much of the paint off the leather as I could and gave it a thorough oiling as it was quite dry. It sat in my garage for a while.
This picture was taken before I started cleaning. You can see that the leather is quite discoloured.
A couple of months later, the company that rents the office next to my employer's office moved out and chucked everything they didn't want in a huge skip/container in the car park. I spent a few lunchbreaks climbing around in there taking things that looked useful/interesting - including two office chairs with bases which looked like they might be suitable for my hybrid chair project. The bases came home and I found that the mounting holes didn't line up at all with the mounting holes on the car seat. So they sat in the garage for a few more months.
My wife had mentioned the project to her friend Andy, who's a bit of a tinkerer. He offered to take the car seat and see if he could clean the rest of the paint off the leather. I loaded the seat into Hayley's car one night before she headed off to work. She snuck down in the morning and put one of the office seat bases in the car and got Andy to make up a subframe to allow the two to be fixed together.
On the day before my birthday, she came home from work and called me out to the car to help her lift out the cleaned car seat. When I opened the boot I saw a completed chair! All the controls still work - the gas lift works (though needs encouragement to go back up due to the heavy seat), both the base and the seat have their own recline mechanisms, the headrest and the bolsters are adjustable.
The seat still looks a bit green here. Over time it has gone back to black.
Big thanks to Andy for welding the subframe! Awesome birthday present!!
This picture was taken before I started cleaning. You can see that the leather is quite discoloured.
A couple of months later, the company that rents the office next to my employer's office moved out and chucked everything they didn't want in a huge skip/container in the car park. I spent a few lunchbreaks climbing around in there taking things that looked useful/interesting - including two office chairs with bases which looked like they might be suitable for my hybrid chair project. The bases came home and I found that the mounting holes didn't line up at all with the mounting holes on the car seat. So they sat in the garage for a few more months.
My wife had mentioned the project to her friend Andy, who's a bit of a tinkerer. He offered to take the car seat and see if he could clean the rest of the paint off the leather. I loaded the seat into Hayley's car one night before she headed off to work. She snuck down in the morning and put one of the office seat bases in the car and got Andy to make up a subframe to allow the two to be fixed together.
On the day before my birthday, she came home from work and called me out to the car to help her lift out the cleaned car seat. When I opened the boot I saw a completed chair! All the controls still work - the gas lift works (though needs encouragement to go back up due to the heavy seat), both the base and the seat have their own recline mechanisms, the headrest and the bolsters are adjustable.
The seat still looks a bit green here. Over time it has gone back to black.
Big thanks to Andy for welding the subframe! Awesome birthday present!!
Yes, we have an artwork overflow problem!
A nice easy one here. We bought a spice carousel several years ago and always kept it on the worktop. Being on the worktop, it got a lot of light, especially in the summer when the sun would shine directly on it in the late afternoon. This led to our herbs and spices getting manky. Obvious solution: put it somewhere dark, like in a cupboard. Problem: it doesn't fit. Yet.
The shelves in our cupboards are adjustable, but the pre-drilled holes for the shelf supports are spaced quite far apart. I emptied the cupboard, and took the opportunity to give it a good clean. Then I measured up and marked and drilled new holes to allow just enough height for the carousel. Put it all back together and voilà.
One of our neighbours moved to a new house, and needed to get rid of a bunch of stuff. She didn't have a car so asked me if I could help take some of it down to the tip. I suggested that I stick it all in my garage and try to find homes for the various things first. That's how I ended up with a coffee table, cupboard, suitcase, two venetian blinds, two DVD players, surround sound speaker system, freeview TV tuner, folding highchair, baby play mat, plastic baby bath, metal candelabra, two large metal candlesticks, two IKEA Storm lamps, and a pair of dissassembled under-bed storage drawers. My wife sighed when she saw what I'd taken on, bless her.
Everything found new homes via Freecycle except for the cupboard - which is still in my garage, holding some of my other stuff - and the drawers - which I thought might be useful.
We had acquired a sideboard for our kitchen via Freecycle a while before, and I decided to modify one of the drawers to go under the sideboard. It had to be made narrower and shallower to fit, so I measured, marked and cut the side and front/back boards. The base is made up of small sheets of hardboard, which also had to be cut down.
There are some holes drilled in the base of the front/back panels where I guess some rods would go to support the base of the drawer. There wasn't any suitable dowel to hand but I did have some scraps of wood which I used to make some braces. They're not pretty, but they do the job (and they're invisible when the drawer is right way up).
The cut edges of the boards were much paler than the faces, so I used some wood stain to try to mask it. The colour's not quite right, but it's much less obvious than it was.
Some of the original casters were damaged but between the two drawer "kits" I was able to put together a set of four casters.
So there you go, the finished article:
Everything found new homes via Freecycle except for the cupboard - which is still in my garage, holding some of my other stuff - and the drawers - which I thought might be useful.
We had acquired a sideboard for our kitchen via Freecycle a while before, and I decided to modify one of the drawers to go under the sideboard. It had to be made narrower and shallower to fit, so I measured, marked and cut the side and front/back boards. The base is made up of small sheets of hardboard, which also had to be cut down.
There are some holes drilled in the base of the front/back panels where I guess some rods would go to support the base of the drawer. There wasn't any suitable dowel to hand but I did have some scraps of wood which I used to make some braces. They're not pretty, but they do the job (and they're invisible when the drawer is right way up).
The cut edges of the boards were much paler than the faces, so I used some wood stain to try to mask it. The colour's not quite right, but it's much less obvious than it was.
Some of the original casters were damaged but between the two drawer "kits" I was able to put together a set of four casters.
So there you go, the finished article:
I listen to a lot of music, and have several pairs of headphones. Some small sets for use on the move, and a couple of larger sets for when I'm at my desk. The larger sets take up a lot of space on the desk when not in use and can get in the way. I bought a couple of screw-in hooks from a local hardware shop, and fitted them to my modified shelving unit.
My office was a mess (actually it's always a mess no matter what I do to it, but let's just gloss over that). There were bags of stuff on the floor, a turntable that didn't have a home, cables everywhere, etc. I decided to get some shelving, planning to put the keyboard on top and have plenty of space underneath for storage. Having bought and built a flat-pack pine shelving unit from a local hardware shop (I think it was B&Q, but can't remember), I discovered that it was too tall, and playing the keyboard would have been quite awkward. So I took the thing out to my garage and grabbed a tape measure and a saw.
Unfortunately there's no before picture showing the original height of the unit, but this is the result. All I did was remove the top shelf, then draw a line about six inches down from the top of each vertical support, and cut the tops off, then re-attached the top shelf. Now it's just the right height for the keyboard and there's still plenty of space on the second shelf for the turntable (minus the lid).
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