Stonehaven Life

How to Clean Rusty Metal Parts

If you’re one of those hardy types that enjoys scrounging through piles of rusty metal, looking for useful pieces to recycle, then you’re gonna love this. John Todd likes to make things out of old rusty machine parts – you know, the industrial stuff that’s built to last. Years of experience He’s learned a lot [...]

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Extreme Weather – 5 Home Protection Tips

The 2012 tornado season ramps up in March in the southern US, and gathers momentum as it moves north throughout the spring and early summer – about the time Atlantic hurricanes start setting a course for the North American east coast. The greatest threats to your home and safety from these storms is wind and [...]

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DIY Gender Trends

DIY Home Improvement and woodworking is pretty much a man’s world. Right? Nope. A pair of surveys show a surprising shift in who’s more likely to wear the tool belt in modern households. Ladies doing more DIY Bosch conducted a survey in Britain, France and Germany and discovered an increasing percentage of women are taking [...]

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3D Printers – DIY Custom Manufacturing

Last week in Part 1, I explored the development of high quality 3D printers, already in widespread use by industrial designers. As with most technologies, the costs are starting to come down to the point where 3D printers are now entering the home user market, allowing you and me to create objects we never could [...]

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Stopcock Caulk

We put men on the moon in 1969, in a lunar landing module that I’m pretty sure had less onboard RAM than my 1986 Chevette, yet we’ve only just recently, achieved the technological breakthrough in caulking tube design, that can miraculously stop the caulk from continuing to ooze out of the tube, even after you [...]

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3-D Printers – The Ultimate DIY Tool

Just imagine, being able to scan an object, load it into your computer, and have a full-colour 3 dimensional copy of that object in your hand a few minutes later. If you’re thinking Star Trek "replicator", you’re pretty much on the money. When Gene Roddenberry opened our minds to these futuristic possibilities back in the [...]

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Make a Roof Pitch Guess-timator

This simple little device represents the kind of creative thinking that’s brought us to the point of living in houses (with roofs) and not in caves. Duane Mackey designs home additions, so he came up with this brilliant idea that lets you estimate the pitch of a roof safety from terra firma. He’s posted the [...]

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Big Red Barn Dance – Part 3

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for… Today, Lee & Katelynn show off the beautiful results of all their hard work and creative use of “treasures” in the conclusion of this 3-part series. You can catch up on the back story here in Part 1. Enjoy! – Rick Decorating to suit the venue With [...]

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Big Red Barn Dance – Part 2

If you’re just tuning in, Lee & Katelynn, a couple of young engineers, took on the challenge of holding their wedding reception in a barn filled with 50 years of accumulated “stuff”. You can catch up on the story here in Part 1. Today, Lee gets into the nitty gritty of whitewashing the barn interior [...]

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Big Red Barn Dance – Part 1

As I mentioned in my Stonehaven Life 2012 Preview, Lee & Katelynn, a couple of young and energetic engineers, took on a mission last year that some of us (like me, and apparently Lee’s father) would have likely dismissed as “crazy”. Today, Lee lays the groundwork of how they transformed a junk-filled barn into a [...]