Four or five years ago, I made Lloyd a messenger bag for work. I used canvas for the outside and put in a tarp lining so that it was waterproof. Since I wanted the seam binding to match, I made some out of the canvas. Shockingly, seven layers of canvas wouldn’t go through my sewing machine (I was using the wrong needle, but it was a new machine back then and I was still figuring it out.), so I sewed the entire thing by hand and it took forever. It turned out well, though.

The first bag.

We hadn’t quite figured out the straps at that point. The smaller one never stayed in and we just gave up after a while.

Lloyd really liked the bag and used it every day but, after a few years, it was really starting to fall apart and I had been saying for the past month that it was first on my priority list after I finished family birthday presents. The reasons he needed a new bag are as follows:

Ink stains.

Lots of attempts at reattaching the straps. The ugly stitching is Lloyd’s; it holds very well.

An attempt at an iron-on patch. It sort of worked…

The coolest failure of them all! Apparently, tarp is woven.

So I made him a new bag with all of the lessons learned from the first one. First of all, I didn’t use canvas and tarp. We’ve become very attached to the waterproof fabrics from Seattle Fabrics, so I used some fabric that was already waterproof from there, negating the necessity of a lining. I also sewed the flaps for the straps into the bag itself instead of sewing them on afterwards. Most importantly, I used my sewing machine so the project took an afternoon rather than all my free time for two weeks. We also made it a little bigger so he could carry more.

The finished bag.

Lloyd only cheers for teams with this color scheme.

This bag is only a week old, but it’s already been used to transport mackerel (probably a mistake) and taken a trip to the beach. Let’s hope it lasts at least as well as the old one did!

Don’t worry, this post is only tangentially related to robots! I do a lot of thesis testing by myself and was sick of the shaky video I was getting. I have access to a laser cutter at school, so I decided to make myself a cell phone stand. I wanted to make the stand flexible so I could take video with the phone either horizontal or vertical. This is the design that I came up with.

Here is the plan I drew up. I based the joints on a jewelry box Lloyd made for me.

The design involved a lot of measuring the dimensions of my phone. I measured the length, width, and height and took all of these into consideration in my planning. Unfortunately, the software we have at school (CorelDraw) couldn’t directly open the file I had saved on my computer at home. When the image was pasted into CorelDraw, the sizing got changed and I had to resize by hand. Of course I didn’t have the measurements in front of me, but I resized it close enough to the correct size to work. Here’s the result.

The stand assembled and ready to use. The glue expanded more than expected, but it doesn’t need to be pretty; it just needs to work.

I don’t have any images of the stand in action, but I can definitely say that the video quality improved substantially. No more shaky video!

For a fair number of the projects I have done in the past year, I have used silver wire in wood inlay for some decoration.  I thought it would be a good idea to share how I do the inlay but, instead of my normal silver wire in a hardwood, I would try bronze in a plywood for some variety.

You will need:

-Metal wire – I like to use annealed silver 0.010″ x 0.040″.  For this project, I cut down some 10 mil strips out of bronze (really C23000 brass but you can’t trust jewelery people to be technical) for the wire.  I have used round wire in the past and this also works; just a word of advice, never use square wire as it is almost imposible to bend without twisting – circles and 2-1 aspect ratio wire at least.

-Gouges- I started off just using an X-acto knife which was OK, then I got a carving set from the art store which was OK, but I just bought a decent set from Woodcraft and it is so nice to use. I love a good tool for the job.

-Needle-nose pliers and a small hammer, nothing fancy here.

-Wood:  You want something with nice color and smallish grains. My favorites are cherry and walnut, both of which look great with silver.  Avoid the pines as they are rather hard to get clean cuts on, but if it is what you want, it will work.  Same with plywood: it works OK but it can chip out as you breakthrough to the different wood layers.

Pretty much all you do is sketch in a design, carve the design out to roughly the width of the wire, bend the wire to fit, cut the wire, press the wire in followed by light hammering, wet the wood, sand down wire to wood level, and finish how you want.  It is pretty simple in theory but requires some light touch and practice in practice.  Well worth it in my opinion.

My practice piece From left to right: The sketched design, design gouged out, the C press fit in.

After you sketch the design, carve out one section and test a wire. When it fits take it out and move onto the next one till you are done.

After all the pieces are done, put them all back in. Tap down with a hammer and water lightly.

The finished product; I used mineral oil as the finish. Not much contrast between the wood and bronze, and the glued in wood dust looks a little funny, but I like it.