Last night I attended Nova Labs "Metal Monday", which I do most weeks if robotics isn't too demanding. It's the metal shop's office hours. People can drop by (or, ideally, sign up in advance) to get advice, project help, or just chat. We almost always get a few people stopping by, with any variety of busted tools, interesting things they're working on, and ideas to discuss. One of these was how I got involved with the Hunter Ranch sign.

Last night was no different. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of the things people brought in (I get too caught up in things sometimes to remember to take them) but we had a guy come by who needed help pressing a bearing onto a shaft for his pool pump, another who wanted advice on stripping down and refinishing a camera stabilization mount, and some impromptu conversation on how to hold an aluminum plate for CNC machining.

Since there are occasionally lulls in the action, I generally bring something of my own to work on. My home shop is quite well equipped, but Nova Labs has space to work, something that is sorely lacking in my shop. This time, it was the Vevor Six-Jaw Lathe Chuck I picked up recently, after being made aware of the incredible price on it.

Of course, like many low-price import tools, it arrived in less-than-stellar condition. It's not that it's damaged, but it was still covered in grinding dust, and basically zero effort had been put into removing burrs and otherwise taking it from "done" to "operates smoothly". But this was expected, given the price, so I knew I was going to have to put in a few hours with some files and blue shop towels.

It's nearly done now, so pretty soon I'll be able to toss it on the lathe and see how accurate it is. Frankly, it doesn't need to be particularly so: on the lathe, if a chuck holds something off-center, it still gets round due to the cutting action, as long as you don't wind up needing the portion that was in the chuck. And that often gets parted off. Anyway, we'll see. For just north of $200, if it works reasonably well, it'll still be a bargain.

What this means for you: nothing, if all goes well. Old links and bookmarks to any of those names still land on the right page, including the RSS feeds. I tested all four names, with paths and query strings, so I'm reasonably confident.

What I'm sorry about: the RSS feeds. Each item's unique ID is built from its full address, and the address just changed from craigandera.org to www.craigandera.org. So when your feed reader next checked in, it probably decided every entry on the site was brand new and showed you all of them again. That's my fault for changing the address out from under you. If your reader dumped a pile of old posts on you, they're the same posts, so you can mark them all read. It should only happen once.

If anything looks broken — a link that doesn't go where it should, a certificate warning, a feed that won't load — tell me. Per the previous entry, I will probably break more stuff as I go.

Anyway, maybe you'll see something you enjoy, or even better, that inspires you. Go check out the Projects area of the site.

There are a couple other, smaller spaces that I'll have to take pictures of some other day.

My task for today was to install a utility sink. It's meant to go here

but as you can tell by the lack of a completion picture, I didn't get it done. I got the sink assembled easily enough, but then it was time to hunt for the tools and fittings that would be needed to tie into the existing plumbing, some of which you can see has been cut. So it was off to Lowe's, where I spent a good hour looking for the combination of sweat fittings, SharkBite fittings, and PVC fittings that a) were actually in the store, and b) would let me complete the job.

By the time I got done with that, it was lunchtime, which Nova Labs generously provided for the volunteers (there was a good turnout today of over a dozen). Then it was off home.

So, much progress today, but nothing finished. I'm sure that will be the case for many weeks to come. Still, I enjoy participating.

I'll probably break more stuff as I go. Since this whole thing is for me, I feel confident the user base won't mind.

I spent most of the day driving the forklift, hauling some one big pieces of equipment over to the metal recycling dumpster.

Only the one photo from the day, but I did get a bit of video (courtesy Heather, my forklift mentor) of the forklift in action moving a particularly large piece:

More weekends on this coming up as the space gets emptied out and the actual renovation work starts.

I have two older sites - my old Blogger site and getsmarterandmakestuff.com - but they're both hosted sites that don't give me the control I want. This site hopefully will work more the way I think about projects.

Posts show up here in a single chronological Log. Projects, ongoing or finished, get their own page with a current summary and, where there is one, the history of updates on them. The Projects page doubles as a gallery of finished builds.

If you'd rather not check back, there's an RSS feed (the icon in the footer), plus a separate feed for each individual project, and one for newly added Projects, if you only care about following one thing.

More to come.