My wife manages a free clothing warehouse for foster children and parents; consequently, she needs lots of sturdy clothing racks that:
To meet this need, I designed and built a rack that accommodates up to 288″ of hanging space in a 30″ x 75″ footprint, and it costs one sheet of plywood plus the cost of the hanging hardware. This is about what it would cost to buy a commercial hanging rack that has 40% of that capacity.
It takes about three hours to build from start to finish; if you build two or three at once, you can get your per-rack time closer to two hours.
Here’s the rack in its natural habitat, waiting for the young clothing to approach so it can attack.
The rack has pounced, filling its belly with winter clothes and pajamas. The rack deserves a nap after this productive hunt indeed.
Here’s a line of seven racks holding 3.1% of a mile of clothing:
If you’d like a copy of the plans, email me at cfinke@gmail.com or leave a comment below.
Our GMC Acadia has a habit of losing its knobs. Luckily, Thingiverse user redpelon had the same problem and designed replacement knobs. I printed a pair and they fit perfectly.
You know how your microwave slides around on the countertop because its hard plastic feet don’t grip on the smooth quartz? Same!
To solve this problem, I had tried putting little adhesive pads under the existing feet, but the surface area was too small to resist the force of the door opening and shutting. So, I printed larger feet to fit around the existing feet so that I could use 2″ carpet tape underneath them. Problem solved! Now I can close the microwave door as violently as I want without it moving an inch.
The OpenSCAD file and and STL are available on GitHub.
Ever since we finished remodeling our kitchen, we had been storing our spices in a drawer using an organization method known as “a pile.”
I promised my wife I would build a cabinet to organize the spices, so I did:
The spice shelves are adjustable; I also included a magnetic bar to hold the measuring cups and a steel bar to hold the magnetic measuring spoons. I added magnets to the corner of the door and cabinet to hold the door shut, since the weight of the spices makes it want to pull open slightly.
We have a birdfeeder that looks like a barn, and you refill it by pouring birdseed through the chimney. This is prone to spilled seed, and a regular funnel often clogs with the larger sunflower seeds. To solve this, I designed and printed a custom square funnel:
It’s square to both create the largest possible opening into the feeder and to allow it to rest evenly on top of the chimney while the feeder is being filled.
The STL and SCAD file are available on GitHub; you can customize the funnel by editing the parameters at the top of the SCAD file.
Roy Orbison’s “You Got It” is in the same key and nearly the same tempo as Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” and the lyrics are complementary, so I made this mashup.
My house’s water is supplied by a well. This well is shared with a dozen other houses, all of which have water meters to track usage. Several years ago, I was volunteered to be the president of this water association, and with this position came the responsibility for tracking water usage to ensure that we’re not losing water to leaks or unauthorized usage.
For a couple of years, I just used a spreadsheet to track meter readings, but I felt like the data I was collecting could be so much more useful in a custom-built application, so I built Metermaid.
Metermaid is a WordPress plugin that adds a dashboard for tracking meter readings. Once you’ve entered some readings, it will begin charting gallons per day over time, comparing usage from this year against previous years, and even highlighting situations where water is potentially being lost due to broken pipes. It’s useful for tracking a single meter or tracking hundreds of meters.
To get started, install and activate Metermaid (available on Github) and then open the “Metermaid” menu item:
Click “Add Meter” to add your meters.
Once you enter meter readings, you will see charts showing gallons per day compared across years and gallons YTD compared across years.
Scroll down, and you’ll see all previous readings.
Metermaid supports the concept of “child meters” and “parent meters.”
A child meter is a meter that only counts usage that is already counted by a meter further upstream (the parent meter).
Imagine you have a well. At the well, there is a pump, and the pump pushes water to three houses. Directly after the pump, there is a meter that counts all gallons that the pump outputs. This is the parent meter. The three house meters are child meters. Their combined readings should equal the reading of the parent meter.
When you set up child and parent meters and then enter readings for all meters in a system on the same days, Metermaid will calculate how much water might be getting lost in the system, either through leaks or unmetered usage. For example, this real-world example shows a parent meter that measured 6.3% higher than the sum of its children meters across a six-month period.
This discrepancy could be due to unmetered water usage, inaccurate meters, or a leak in the distribution system. (It was a leak in the distribution system — an old repair had failed, but with this Metermaid feature, I was able to track it down and get it fixed.)
Metermaid also supports the concept of supplementary water. “Supplements” are a way to track water that is added to a system between a parent and a child meter.
Imagine you have a well, and a pump pumps water from the well into a holding tank, from which three houses draw. Your well pump breaks, so you have water delivered directly into your holding tank. Without tracking this supplementary water, it will appear that the houses have used more water than the well provided.
Metermaid also solves the annoying issue of meter rollovers by using “real readings.” Imagine you have a water meter that reads 999999. The next day, you check the meter, and it reads 000001. Even though the meter shows a single gallon, its real reading is actually 1,000,001 gallons. Metermaid automatically calculates what the true reading of a meter is based on previous readings.
Real readings are recalculated any time you add or delete a reading, so adding historical meter data will only make them more accurate.
It is possible for the real reading to be wrong due to lack of data. If you read a 6-wheel meter on January 1 and it reads 500000 and then you check it again on February 1, and it reads 600000, there’s no way to know whether it measured 100,000 gallons or 1,100,000, and Metermaid will assume 100,000. If you added a reading from January 15 of 900000, then Metermaid would correctly update the real reading to 1600000.
Metermaid is available for free on Github. Contact me with any questions.