For some reason I only have been posting the small things I build; maybe I’ve still got the mindset of ole aerialcopper.blogspot.com. I spend most of the time making bigger things for other people now, like this wood shed:

Similar construction but more of an ornamental thing: a chuppah for a friend’s wedding. The diagonals midway down the sides are temporary.

I also built an off-grid solar system for family. They wanted the panels to tilt from summer to winter. The panels themselves weigh ~500 lbs and the wind sometimes blows 50 mph in the fall. I had some 1.63” dia x .14” wall galvanized tube laying around that I welded into the tilting frame. I used 7018 electrodes from the oven and did put some effort into making decent welds.

I actually pitched another more complex design for this mount, with the intention of allowing the panel angle to be adjusted by a single person using a cable winch. Ultimately I went with this design, but I still snuck in a few details from mine. These include the slanted top on the wooden base and rod-end style attachment on the bottom of the struts.

Here’s the guts:

I’ll cram two more in this post. One, some living room cabinets I made. VG fir plywood and drawer slide construction, though the tops are solid. If I ever make something like this again, I don’t think I’ll use plywood. Solid wood or some other material.

Scrolling through these terrible old phone photos, I notice aluminum sheet in the place of plywood in the cabinets I built after. This is not a coincidence. Here is a WIP of a bathroom cabinet I hacked together for myself outside at the end of a 100’ extension cord. The screw holes were plugged and my wife painted the wood frame.

And lastly, a temporary kitchen counter base. The leg units are super heavy duty, they are mortised together. I have a feeling this is going to be a workbench most of its life. The apron fits onto the leg units with tight lap joints; time will tell if they stay that way. In any case, this 9’6” W x 34” H x 26” D unit disassembles to fit into a mid-size sedan.