Blue Scream of Jeff: SketchUp

Showing posts with label SketchUp. Show all posts

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Who says woodworking and IT don’t mix?

My server rack as planned (left) and as built (right) after finally
assembly in my shop before I moved it into my office.

A while back I wrote about how IT and woodworking are similar, as they both are really about problem solving.

Yet whenever I assert this, I still draw skeptical looks.

People just cannot see how turning something as tangible as a few boards of wood into a piece of furniture is anything like manipulating a bunch of ones and zeros that only exist in cyberspace.

Well, this month, I’ve finally provided a real-world example of how IT and woodworking can mix by creating my own network/server rack.

What’s a network/server rack you ask and why did I build it?

Well, simply put, a network/server rack is a place were IT professionals like me can hang and organize the assorted bits and pieces of equipment that allow computers to talk to each other
and access files and applications that are not directly loaded on them. I decided I needed a rack now after I acquired and fixed an Uninterruptable Power Supply unit that was meant to hang on such a rack.

I already had a small battery backup unit – or UPS for short – on the floor behind my desk, but its battery had long since died and even when new, it wouldn’t power my gear for much longer that 10 minutes if the power went out.

This rack mounted UPS would power almost all of my gear for about an hour and the cost of replacing its battery wasn’t much more than replacing the battery in my smaller unit, so it was a no-brainer as to which one I should fix.

This was only some of the networking and storage gear
that was scattered around my office that I was able to
consolidate into my rack

The only problem was, were to put it?

I could have just let it sit on top of a filing cabinet with my PCs stacked on top of it, but that seemed kind of junky. Plus, my other networking equipment was scattered all around my home office and for years I’ve been telling myself I really need put it all in one place and organize it better. So, this just seemed like the perfect opportunity to take care of two problems at once.

The first thing I did was to go online and see how much one of these network racks cost, and I was shocked by their price tags. Even the simplest two-post models were well over $150!

Admittedly, I’m a cheapskate, but that seemed pretty excessive to me for what is essentially two pieces of perforated angle iron held in a vertical position and connected at the base. I knew I could get that angle iron for about $30 at a big-box hardware store and couldn’t see why I needed to spend $120 more for one that was already put together.

After about 10 minutes of additional web research, I not only found that making your own DIY rack was not only feasible but really easy. I’d even come up with a design that would make it look more furniture-like and less industrial-looking.

Two views of my home-made rack, all set up and in place in my
office. The aim was to have it look as much like a piece of
furniture as it could while still serving its function holding
all my tech gear. Proof that IT and woodworking do mix!

The next step was to translate that idea into a physical set of plans. I’ve been doing woodworking long enough to know that the plans I create in my head, don’t always work out the way I think they will in the real word. Inevitably, I miss some small detail that winds up throwing off the entire project and I then need to spend hours figuring out a work-around to get myself back on track.

That’s why I have started using SketchUp.

This free, 3D-modeling program lets me build the project virtually almost in the same way I’d build it out in my shop. This way I can see any problems that may arise and fix them before I start cutting any wood.

And sure enough, while coming up with the virtual version you see here, I did find one of those small hiccups. But unlike hours it would have taken me to fix in the shop, I corrected the plan with just a few clicks of my mouse, so that when I did get to the shop there were no delays.

The one thing my plans did not show, however, was how sturdy and rigid the final product would be. That’s why the finished product looks a bit different from the plan. These are the kind of unexpected things I don’t mind, because it actually saved me some time in the shop!

Once I had finalized the plan on the computer and ordered the hardware online (I found a few “genuine” rack parts online that were even cheaper than the angle iron I was going to use from the big-box store), I ran out and got two, eight-foot 2x4s and started my build.

I was able to cut and assemble all the parts in a single day. Staining the wood to match my office future took about another week, but if I’d decided to paint it black, I could have finished this project in a single weekend.

So here it is, proof for all those remaining doubters that you CAN combine woodworking and IT in a very practical way.

Now, I’ve just got to figure out how to build that wooden computer case I’ve always wanted….

Monday, May 28, 2018

Adventures in Woodworking: The Build Begins!

For most people Memorial Day Weekend marks the beginning of summertime cook-outs, beach vacations and long-lazy days lounging by the pool.

For me it marks the official opening of my woodworking shop and start of a project or two destined to take me all summer to complete.

This year, that project is a long-awaited series of built-in cabinets and bookshelves which will eventually surround the new big-screen TV I wrote about getting last November.

I’ve been talking about building this since we moved in 20 years ago, and now that we finally got that shiny, new, big flat-screen TV, and re-arranged our living room, I’ve run out of excuses to put it off. So now that I’m finally getting around to this long-awaited project, I’d thought I should document its construction. At first I thought about filming it, like the way my favorite Youtube woodworkers do. But my medium has never really been film. It’s always been the written word and trying to break into video production with such a large project was not realistic. I might do it someday, but for now I thought I’d just document my project here with a few pictures and captions.

THE CONCEPT:

My house is a bi-level home with what are called knee-walls on the lower level. These are short walls built on top of a concrete foundation wall. The concrete portion juts into the room more than the upper section forming an odd, shallow shelf along the length of the wall, usually at the three-foot mark. It looks odd and makes the room feel more like a basement than a family room. So my plan was to hide the ledge by turning it into a series of shallow cabinets. Then on top of those cabinets I planned to build bookshelves making the entire wall look like a built-in breakfront. There will be an empty section in the middle of the bookshelves where the flat screen TV will hang.

The first thing I did was measure the walls in my living room to get an idea how large an area I had to work with. It was quite big, almost 12 feet long and just under 8 feet tall. Then like all good geeks do, it was off to the computer to draw up a set of plans.

And not just any plans.

I spent a weekend or two refining my ideas to until I came up with a three-dimensional model in Sketchup that you can see above. It may look complicated, but this project really calls for nothing more than building a series of boxes at different sizes and connecting them.

Then, just because I could, I decided to take a quick cellphone picture of the area these shelves will occupy and though the magic of Photoshop merged the plan with the picture to give me an idea of what they’d look like in place. You can see that at right.

THE BUILD BEGINS:

With the plan in place, and after hemming and hawing over the type of plywood to use for the two base cabinets (they will be covered by solid cherry doors), I made my way to the big box store to pickup the material. The parts from both cabinets came from a sheet and a half of 3/4” birch plywood with the backs coming from a sheet of 1/4” plywood.

Here you can see me loading the material into my new car. It’s amazing what you can fit into a hatchback!

Then it was back to the shop to start breaking the material down to its individual parts:

Here are all the individual parts for both cabinets which were cut from the pieces you saw me load into my car: two tops and bottoms, four sides, two backs and four shelves.

Okay, I kind of cheated here. I had some extra plywood at home and cut them into 3 ½” strips to form the bases each cabinet will sit on.

Here’s one of the cabinets dry-fitted together. If you look closely, you can see the rabbet running around the edges of each piece for the back. The shelves are not permanent. There will be holes along each side so I can adjust them. They were just placed in there to verify I had cut to the correct size.

Before assembly, I decided it would be easier to stain each part lying flat on my workbench rather than trying to stain parts that were standing vertically or hanging down and would avoid finish either not getting all the way into corners or pooling there.

The problem with doing things this way, is that there were so many parts, that it took up BOTH bays of my garage workshop for a week. Mrs. BlueScream wasn’t really happy about that as she has this odd idea that garages are for parking cars in and NOT for workshops. Silly, Mrs. BlueScream…..

With the parts finally stained and sealed with three-coats of polyurethane, I was finally able to start gluing the cabinets together and staining the shelves.

Next month, I hope to have the center stereo equipment cabinet together and in place in the house. Then I’ll be able to start on the face frames and doors. I’ll keep you updated!

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Adventures in Woodworking

Over the next couple of months, I hope to chronicle how I build the King George II-inspired bookcase at left to replace our crappy old family room bookshelf at right.

After a long week, I like to unwind and catch up with all the projects my favorite on-line woodworkers have posted on their Youtube channels. I think of this as my own personal Woodworking/Makers TV channel that only airs once a week on late Friday nights/early Saturday morning.

I’m always inspired by the things these people come up with, and just a bit envious of the amount of time they can spend in their shops. I go to bed afterwards with a renewed enthusiasm to not only get into my own shop and build the dozens of projects rattling around in my head, but to start my own Youtube channel and film my own adventures in woodworking.

But by the time Saturday afternoon rolls around, that enthusiasm has faded and after taking care of the 1001 little things that always seem to eat up my free time on the weekends, what little enthusiasm I have left is often killed off having to do yard work. (Forget the robot maid, what I really want is a robotic grounds crew to take care of my yard!)

Not every weekend is like that and I do manage to get a fair amount of shop-time in during the warmer weather here in the Northeast. But trying to film and edit those projects to produce a professional-looking video would just take up too much time I already don’t have.

Rather than just relegating that idea to the “Perhaps Someday” or “When I Retire” pile, I thought I’d try to document a complete project here in this blog.

Lately I’ve been struggling to come with interesting topics for each month’s column, and thought this might help me kill two birds with one virtual stone.

So this month, I’d thought I’d introduce you to the latest project I have in mind: A King George II inspired bookcase.

Since moving into our house 18 years ago, I’ve been meaning to replace a plain, cheap bookcase in our family room with something a bit better.

The particle board shelves have begun to sag under the weight of all the books and chachkies on it, it’s hard dust and all our old record albums are just stored in an old crate on top of it.

The picture of the King George II bookcase I found while browsing online looks like it could be adapted to hold all of our LPs in the squat cabinet on the bottom, while the glass-enclosed upper section would keep dust and dog hair off the books and chachkies, making dusting much easier. Plus the bookcase would match the style of the furniture in that room much better than the current one does.

So in the coming months, I’m going to cover how I go about turning this picture into a set of working plans in SketchUp (something I don’t usually do), my trials and tribulations trying to find the perfect materials for this (popular?cherry? mahogany?), then detail each step of the build from first cut, to finishing and installing it in the room.

So stay tuned. This should be an interesting ride…..