Belt-Grinder on Craig Andera

Brass Aiming Markers

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

These are based on this commercial product, an aiming aid for golf. I don't golf, so I'll take their word for how it works. A coworker said he'd like me to make one for him some day, and I said, how about today? I whipped the first one up on the evening of May 1, 2025. It only takes about half an hour.

It's a brass plate with a V-notched top edge and a fan of radiating slots engraved into it. Cut the brass to shape on the band saw, smooth it out on the belt grinder, laser engrave the marks, and fill them with epoxy.

On the back of that first one, I laser engraved my own logo.

A month later he asked for a batch. These got the K from our company logo on the back instead of mine, and I believe some of them were given to clients. Look at me - impressing customers on the golf course like an executive. Well, sort of like an executive. OK, nothing like an executive.

Plasma Cut Gecko

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine had an old stainless steel pizza "stone" that he wasn't using, and he asked me if I wanted it. Free metal? Heck yes. His only condition was that we cut out a gecko. It's based on a sketch his kid made when he was little. Fun stuff.

The second one got cleaned up on the belt grinder.

HouseMade Belt Grinder

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I bought this belt grinder as a kit from HouseMade. It was a lot of fun to put together, and it is one of my favorite tools; I use it all the time. I think it's my younger daughter's favorite tool in the shop, too.

It absolutely eats anything you feed into it, but you can do relatively delicate work with it as well. I use it to sharpen all my knives, and I can get them razor sharp. But it does a lot more than that: everything from weld prep to stock removal.

It was pretty easy to assemble, too, even for someone with my limited skill in welding.

Building it

Here it is partway through the build, before the belt went on.

At some point during the build, I thought I had misplaced a piece of tubing that came with the kit. I looked for it absolutely everywhere, multiple times, and in the end just couldn't find it. So I decided to weld up a replacement piece.

Of course, as soon as I did that, even though the replacement was working just fine, I found the missing piece sitting right where I'd set it, right next to where I was welding.

Afterwards (December 2021)

A few days after finishing it, I tried a leather strop on the grinder. Razor sharp in seconds.

Later that same morning I got it off the bench and onto a new plywood rolling cabinet stand. Well, it's off the bench at least. The shop is getting crowded.