Pi in the Sky

Do It Yourself Badly

Posted on June 14th, 2007 at 8:58pm by Pi.
Categories: Unimultiverse, Personal.

I’ve been doing some DIY today. The purpose was more trying my skills on manual works with some tools, rather than building something useful. However, the results have been quite disappointing.

After doing some needed holes on the walls of the kitchen, I proceeded to use some old timber I had laying around, and create a monitor wooden frame. Now you’d ask, “why would anyone want to make a wooden frame for a monitor?” Well, the answer is quite easy: vertical games. The TFT I bought doesn’t rotate, and just laying it against the wall isn’t too stable. So I made a cumbersome, yet pragmatical approach to the problem, and designed the following frame.

As you can see, the frame only has three sides. Its inner measures are just slightly larger than my monitor. The idea is to slide it around the monitor from the top; once the monitor is in the frame, grab both the monitor and the frame, and rotate 90 degrees to left or right. The base of the frame is wide enough to make it stable. It is ugly, it is cumbersome; but it is a great solution for making a vertical monitor base.

So I only had to cut 7 pieces of a given size; then make 28 holes (some perpendicular, some parallel to the wood surface); and finally use these allen screws for assembling. While the plan was easy, actually doing it wasn’t so straightforward. I encountered some problems.

I’ll try to make it brief. One problem was the wood piece: it was old. It wasn’t in good shape. So when introducing the screws, the slightest misaligment in the holes would cause the wood to just open. That caused one of the bases to break, so I had to cut it. It’s now 10cm shorter than the other base. I can put the frame to any side, so I can still rotate to both sides. But the conclusion is: use good quality materials.

Regarding the hole misaligment, you can easily make one hole in one piece, another one in another piece, and they will match pretty well. If you do two holes in one piece, and two holes in another piece, they will probably not match. The solution would be to make first one pair of holes, and put the screw. Once both pieces are tied properly, make the second hole in both pieces at the same time. That way all would be perfectly aligned. Sadly, I realized that this method was 100 times better than any seemingly perfect measurement after I did all the holes. Completely misaligned, of course. Conclusion: you learn from errors, but to learn, you must fail at least once.

Another problem was the el-cheapo tools. I bought a driller for 10 euro. Came with a set of 15 drills for free. Amazingly, it’s a great tool. It does all you want from a driller, and the drills are quality drills. 100% happy with this buy. But yesterday I bought a jigsaw (the tool, not the game) for only 8 euro. The tool is good enough, but the blade within the box is absolutely awful. I had some problems to cut some simple old wood, due to the extremely poor quality of the blade. The tool behaved quite well for such a low price - however I think next time I’ll buy a circular saw to make straight cuts, instead of elongated ’s’.

All in all, I finally finished the thing, put some adhesive felt in the inside to not scratch the outer rims of the monitor, and tested it successfully with Dodonpachi. In the end, I’ll buy new pieces of better wood, already cut, so this one was only a test. But still, it was great to do something with my hands for a change. It makes one feel a different kind of proudness. And now I have a little bit more experience for when I get the new computer desk and book shelf pieces!

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