Mitchell's Builds

Clothesline This project was completed September 13th, 2018 and can also be viewed on Instructables .       I helped a friend but together a couple poles for a clothesline.  They wanted it to be about six feet tall, and the top part to be about three feet wide, so we grabbed four 4x4" square posts that were eight feet long.      Two of them would be the vertical posts.      One of them would make the two top horizontal pieces.      And the last one would make the four 45° support pieces. Joinery       We decided to join the top piece to the vertical piece with a half-lap joint . I set my circular saw to cut half the depth of the post and used a speed square as a guide to make repeated cuts in the area we wanted to remove. We then used a hammer and chisel to remove the slivers, and cleaned up the joint with a couple hand planes and a rasp. We did this for the center of the horizontal pieces, and th...

Fire Pit 1 Built June 17, 2018 by Mitchell Hollis I wanted a small fire pit for burning wood scraps that could be easily tucked away in my garage when it wasn't being used. Cutting the Steel   I started with three 1'x1' sheets of 16 gauge steel that I grabbed from Home Depot. I wanted the sides to taper, so I cut the bottom plate to be 10"x10" and cut the side plates so that they'd be 10" at the bottom and 12" at the top. I used a cut-off wheel on my angle grinder to make all the cuts. I clamped a scrap piece of 2x2 to my bench to use as a guide. Welding Shield I used this sheet metal shield to avoid setting my wood storage on fire or blinding my neighbors. It is made out of some galvanized sheet metal, scarp aluminum tubing for a bottom structure, and piano hinges so the walls can be folded down. The whole things is held together with pop-rivets. Welding     This was my first major project after getting a welder so my welds weren't su...