First full year in a Scottish Workshopshed

January 2, 2022

The year started differently than usual. Due to lock down there was no PSTOIC dinner and hence no medal creating. I’m expecting this year to be the same but if there is a meetup, I’ll see if I can ship the medal down. Also was the first spring since the move to Scotland.

House and Garden

The other big change this year is that there is plenty to do around the house and garden. That’s taken time from workshop activities but has also created some fun projects. The freezing weather and strong winds also have provided their own challenges.

At the end of 2020, I had been making a router circle jig, so that I could cut some circular holes in our front doors and let in a bit more light. The jig was tested in January and worked well although the doors proved a challenge as they were hollow.

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Another big project in the spring was the garden gate. This involved chopping an existing fence and welding new tubes and tabs in place. My stick welding still leaves a lot to be desired so swapping to TIG gave a better result. I still have a big pile of metal to make a welding cart, hope to get that done this year. After concreting and bolting the fate in place it was painted and the wooden boards fixed back on with my new favourite fixing “self-drilling screws”.

Element14 Presents

I continued making videos this year for Element14 Presents.

In the spring, I was working on the first of four projects for Element14, “Fizz Buzz”. Some 14 segment displays were used to make a game using the new Raspberry Pi Pico.

The next project was a mini remake of Cheesoid. It couldn’t tell the difference between petrol and cheese but it could detect petrol like vapours and speak.

The third project was a smart book-nook, it used an camera and AI processing to detect faces and display them on a tiny E-Ink display. The N-scale scene was then lit by a number of NeoPixels and some street lamps.

The final project of the year hasn’t been shown just yet but involves heatsinks, power Mosfets and the chip that runs inside a NeoPixel.

Smaller Projects and Repairs

There have been some smaller projects and repairs, many of those around the house and garden didn’t even get a mention on the blog but I did write up how I replaced a step in our planned games room, made a fairy door and repaired a hammer.

One of my favourite projects was creating a wand rack, that used some of the wood from the step replacement and I carved in some Celtic style knots before burning them to give some colour.

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Also using some wood from that step, I created a real-life Workshopshed logo, that was stained green and the graphics provided via a vinyl cutout. There was also a second book-nook project but that will get mentioned in its own post shortly.

The bench upgrade was the last project of the year and that is progressing well. The re-enforcement is complete and the work on the vice support was started in the last couple of days. I also finally got to try out a grinder stand, something that couldn’t really be used in the old shed.

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By Andy from Workshopshed Add Comment

  Posted in: Yearly Review Tags: 2021