Kitchen Hand Mixer Autopsy

The other night I heard a great deal of fuss emanating from the kitchen.

Poking my head around the corner, I noticed my spouse was in the midst of mixing a batch of chocolate chip cookies (yum), however, after 10 years of faithful service, the electric mixer that she was using had decided at that moment to cease functioning. 

The mixer was still making the appropriate noises that you would expect, but the beaters were definitely not beating anymore. 

Initial diagnosis - stripped gears

After finishing mixing the cookie dough the old fashion way and doing some quality control testing of the resulting cookies, I decided it was time to take a look at the mixer and find out what really killed it.

Turning a Simple Clock on a Lathe

Now I was always intrigued by clocks, even from a young age.

A few years ago, I came across an old report card that was issued during my tenure in kindergarten. In the report, the teacher made a comment that one day I had somehow gotten my hands on a box of "broken" alarm clocks - which were being used to teach us how to tell time - and somehow I had managed to get those clocks to work again. Which was pretty amazing except for the fact that I had somehow managed to make the alarms go off during nap time!

Needless to say, I always found timepieces interesting, as evidenced by previous projects that I've posted.

A few months ago I posted a little tutorial on how to turn wooden bowl blanks on a lathe.

Well, I got sidetracked a little bit with some other projects, but the lathe was starting to look a little lonely so I figured that I should give it a little love and try making something with it again.

The project that I settled on was basically an extension of the bowl blank, but with some extra touches including rounding the edges of the blank and cutting a groove into the face.

The spark of this project was due to some more experimentation that I was doing with the Cricut Maker where I wanted to see how the Maker handled fine detail work on wood veneer.

So, being a creature of habit,  I decided to build a clock using the Maker and my lathe.

Building an Aquarium Stand - Step 6: Putting It All Together

After all planning and construction, it's finally time to put everything together and get things ready for George to move into his new home.

Since I took a modular approach to the build, assembly is pretty straight forward.

Building an Aquarium Stand - Step 5: Adding a Door

With the major components of the aquarium stands now built, I just needed to do one more thing before I put everything together,

As I mentioned in my initial design sketches for the stand, I wanted to have a door to cover up the front storage opening in order to hide all of George's food and supplies.

Building an Aquarium Stand - Step 4: Building the Base

With the body of the aquarium stand out of the way, the last major component to build the base of the stand.

Since the base of the aquarium stand is going to have to carry the full weight of the aquarium along with the stand itself, I needed to engineer in a lot of extra strength into the base, however, I needed to make sure that it reflected the character of the rest of the stand.

To build in that strength, I decided to have the stand predominately built out of a much heavier material - 2X4 lumber.