Category: Featured

This video shows how I built a portable wood-fired pizza oven that’s inexpensive, easy to build, weighs only 7.5 pounds, and can be carried easily in a backpack. And it makes fantastic pizza too!

Also see our Cooking with Fire event where we used this oven along with some other great fire cooking techniques.

Materials List

Here are the materials I used to build this oven. I recommend getting these materials locally but in case you can’t, I’ve included links to amazon.com.

• (2) Full-size stainless steel warming pans, 2.5 inches deep
• (4) Threaded rods 5/16″ diameter, 12″long
• (8) Wing nuts, 5/16″
• (8) Hex nuts, 5/16″
• (4) Fender washers, 5/16″
• (1) Roll of stainless steel safety wire
• (1) Pizza stone, 10″ diameter

Tools

These are the tools I used for this project, again with links in case you have trouble finding any of these items:

• Milwaukee M18 Cordless drill
• WEN Angle grinder
• Metal cutoff blade 4-1/2″
• Metal grinding wheel
• Dremel rotary tool kit
• Linesman pliers
• Long nose pliers

I built this welding cart to hold my new Everlast PowerPro 205S TIG Welder and Plasma Cutter as well as my Lincoln MIG Welder. The cart features a large work surface and five hitch-style attachment points for mounting accessories such as a bench vise and camera supports.

Resources

I used SketchUp software to design the cart, and here is the model file: WeldingCart.skp. You are welcome to download this model and customize it any way you like.

Here’s a link to the Menard’s Masterforce 30-inch Five-Drawer Mobile Tool Cabinet around which this cart is built.

I used a 4 in. Swivel Vise with Anvil from Harbor Freight. It’s an inexpensive vise but the quality is good enough for my purposes.

Also from Harbor Freight I bought the 8 in. Deep Throat U-Clamp and 12 in. Deep Throat U-Clamp for under $10 each. The 12-inch clamp is deep enough to reach almost anywhere on the 25-inch wide work surface of my cart. Their quality seems pretty good for the price.

After finishing my Modular CNC Controller I built this 4th axis attachment for my CNC router and my milling machine. This will let me machine parts such as gears, and carve 3D patterns wrapped around cylindrical shapes. In the Part 1 video I build the main drivetrain components, using a harmonic drive gearbox to get precise angular positioning and high torque with low backlash.

In the Part 2 video I weld and machine the steel enclosure, install the harmonic drive system, and try it out.

In this video I apply Powder Coating to the housing.

Documentation

The Harmonic Drive web site has detailed information about the style of gearbox that I used. The Catalog link on that page provides detailed documentation about this family of ultra-low-backlash gearboxes.

I bought the 3-jaw front-mounting self centering lathe chuck from Shars. Any similar chuck should work, provided that it can be mounted from the front.

I bought my stepper motor on Ebay after quite a bit of searching to find one with the specs I wanted, including the 8mm output shaft to fit the coupling on my particular gearbox. Here is a link to a similar Nema 23 stepper motor on Amazon.com, but with the more common 1/4″ output shaft.

Aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (growing plants without soil). The wastes from the fish are broken down by bacteria living in the growing medium, and converted into a form that can be used by the plants.

Integrated Vertical Tube System
Here’s a drawing and a photo of the integrated vertical tube aquaponics system we built. The photo shows the tubes in the planting/harvesting position; normally they are rotated 180 degrees so that the openings face the window.

I made the drawing using SketchUp, a great free 3-D drawing program. If you have SketchUp and want my drawing file you can download it by clicking here.

To make the grow tubes, I cut slots across with a hack saw and then heated the plastic with a heat gun to soften it. Once it was soft I pushed in a tapered wooden plug to hold it open until the plastic hardened again. I did this outside because the PVC gives off some fumes when you heat it. The second photo below shows a close up of one of the openings after the tube was filled with pea gravel.

The PVC caps on the bottom of the tubes have slots cut around the edges with a table saw, so that any water that might drip out around the plants can just run down the outside of the tube and through the slots. Otherwise the cap would seal against the funnel and the water could not drain. Normally the water flows down through the tube and out the holes I drilled in the bottom of the cap.

The photo below shows the top of the system, with the flow control valves that regulate the flow of water to each tube. These were necessary in order to balance the flow because without them, most of the water runs into the tube closest to the pump. Note that the tubing is black in order to prevent algae from growing inside it, but after a while it will still develop a film inside from beneficial bacteria that break down the fish wastes. We found that it was necessary to clear the tubes out now and then, by closing all but one valve and turning the pump off and on. The sudden surge of water when the pump starts is enough to clean the accumulated biofilm that adheres to the inside of the tubing.

April 3, 2007  We got fish today! They are about 3″ long and cost us $3 apiece. Their first meal was a small handful of earthworms, which they ate eagerly. I think the one in the bottom picture is burping.

Here’s my new experimental setup to permit multiple fish to each establish a breeding territory in one tank:

5-2-2007  Here’s our first harvest of lettuce, which totaled a whopping 9 grams (0.3 ounces)! The lettuce is a red variety so the color is normal for this type.

6-3-2007: We’ve had quite a few salads now and the plants are doing great. The spinach is spindly but the basil, upland cress and lettuce are thriving.

8-14-2007 We’ve got babies! We hadn’t looked closely for a while so we were surprised to see about 50 little tilapia in the tank today and they’re already over 1 cm long. The water isn’t normally this cloudy but we just cleaned the tank so it’s all stirred up.

The adults are doing well too, and they’ve grown quite a bit.

9-3-2007: The first group of babies have grown to about 1″ long, and we now have a second brood of little ones. The adults pretty much ignore them but the larger babies will “thin out” the smaller ones for us. It’s survival of the fittest in this tank!

Epilog: We shut down this project in the spring of 2008, in preparation for moving to Michigan. We ate the largest of the fish, which weighed in at about 10 ounces – not quite market size but enough for a taste anyway, and it was pretty tasty.In retrospect we wouldn’t undertake any serious fish-raising project without first developing a food source, as purchasing fish food getsrather pricey plus there’s no control over its contents. We’d also use a tank that’s easier to clean!

This project is the first real test of the new Modular CNC Controller and 4th Axis Assembly that I built. I used themto engrave a micrometer dial to make an adjustable carriage stop for my metal lathe, which is based on a YouTube video by Tubalcain. Here’s how the finished part looks:

The first video shows how I modeled the part and created engraving toolpaths using AutoDesk Fusion 360:

The second video shows the machining of the dial using the toolpaths generated in Part 1:

I ran into some difficulties during the machining, one of which was that my cheap stepper motor drivers were not able to keep up with the pulse rate coming from the DDCSV1.1 control panel. Upgrading them to higher-end drivers solved the problem, and the specific ones I’m using are the KL-5056 from Automation Technology:

This driver supports a power supply up to 50V and can deliver up to 5.6A of current, which is more than I need for the steppers I’m using at the moment, but I also plan to use these drivers someday to run my milling machine where I’ll need bigger stepper motors. I have the drivers set at 2.7A for the smaller stepper motors that I’m using on the CNC Shark router and the 4th axis. I noticed that in addition to solving the problem I was having with lost steps on the Z axis, the improved drivers also gave noticably smoother motion and less noise.