This is my standing workstation. I’ve worked from home for over seven years now, it was time to give my back an alternative position.

Simple as can be, it’s a solid old tripod coupled with a bamboo platform with a standard tripod mount insert installed. The tripod came from the local junk shop, Quriosa, the bamboo plywood came of course from the garbage (who throws that stuff out?). Funny thing- I got the tripod without a head, then more than a year later digging in boxes at the shop I found part of the head, then a day later found the missing adjustment handle. Serendipity.

More stuff from the garbage: steel Ikea table legs & random plywood.

I’m happy to say this was a one-day build, with a couple of hours after to clean up the finish.

Someone asked so I’ll mention that the bicycle balances just fine by itself, the lock chains are simply stored that way for convenience.

This is a cedar plank shed/barn door turned shelf. The door came from Quriosa, an eclectic little shop on our street. It was already cut in half so I didn’t have to feel bad about repurposing it. The steel is 7mm stainless rod (from Christian Fode in Nørrebro), just barely stiff enough.

It measures 72″(183cm) L x 14″(36cm) D x 19″(48cm) H. The amplifier in the photo weighs 56lbs (25.5kg), so it’s strong enough despite the relatively thin rod diameter.

It has been a dark winter, but I think this turned out okay anyway…

Meant for the long winters of Copenhagen, when you just don’t want to get out of bed. Stow-able thanks to folding legs. Made from a discarded piece of counter top, and some 1/4″ stainless rod. Heavy-duty so the hot toddy won’t spill.

This is an old overhead projector cart converted to a bare-bones Ms. Pacman cocktail table (still no top glass). It has two Hap joysticks and an Ultimarc I-Pac USB joystick board.

There are some setup notes on the corresponding wiki page.

This is our coffee table. It is a piece of discarded wood and some discarded aluminum channel. It’s the first thing I ever mocked up in SketchUp and made in real life. Joints are pop-riveted. It wobbles some, but will hold a coffee cup.

old beam = chair.

diesel gallery, red hook, brooklyn, march 2007

These are made from the same batch of steel as my much larger table legs. The glass is 3/4″ thick, 1′ square, held to the tables with 1/4-20 counter-sunk socket head screws cut down on my old Craftsman 109 lathe. The glass was cut, drilled and polished by Cristal Vetro in Brooklyn. It turns out that 3/4″ thick glass is very, very expensive.

This is a flat-pack incline weight bench made from a short length of poplar. I never got around to taking nice pics of it, and unfortunately it didn’t make the cut when we moved.

Steps to make a table:

1) Barter for a 250lb. 8ft. long piece of wood.
2) Get 5 friendly people to put said wood on top of your car.
3) Drive 20 mph the entire length of Manhattan enjoying the
oo’s and ah’s.
4) Find one faithful friend to help remove burden from car.
5) Drop it on your thigh.
6) Pickup 150 lbs. of discarded steel gates from another friend.
7) Strip paint off steel for hours and hours and hours.
8) Cut.
9) Weld.
10) Post pictures to geeky website.

This was my first large welding project. Some of the work was done with an ancient AC/buzzbox machine purchased for $50. The latter half was completed with a Miller Maxstar 140 purchased off of ebay for quite a bit more money. The difference was staggering however in the arc and quality welds.

All the steel tubing was made from discarded bed frames collected over a few months. My friend Nick suggested using bed frames for cheap steel. Nick credits John Arbo for the idea. The steel is cheap, sure, but not having a chop saw means about 15 minutes per set of bed frames to prep them/cut off all the extra crap. Then you have to weld those pieces into tubing. Then cut that tubing and create the frames. Then (in my case at least) take the paint off with flap discs. This took me so much time I’m almost crying as I write this.

The shelves are 1/2″ plexi. Yes it will scratch easily. Yes I should have used glass. Give it a rest.

The first pic is what an “apartment” looks like when trying something like this. Let it serve as a warning to all.

This is a junked antique toaster I found on the street turned into a tube phono stage. I used a random Fisher phono stage schematic I found since it only used two triodes per channel. It was a gift for my friends Kevin and Katie. It doesn’t sound that great unfortunately (a lot thin), but I ran out of time to really figure out why (probably input/output impedance). My favorite part is probably the power cable, “antiqued” by using the sleeve of an elastic cord.

I purchased some scaffolding boards from a local warehouse that was selling off everything their business didn’t take with them when they left Red Hook. There were ten pieces, all 1-1/2″ to 2″ thick plywood planks. Extraordinarily heavy and strong. The boards sat stacked in a bin in the corner for probably 4 months (some of them 14′ long, not exactly an eyesore, but not exactly pleasing to look at). My girlfriend asked if we were ever going to do anything with them, to which I replied that if she designed and measured out some shelves, I’d build them. So she spent a night thinking and sketching and came up with what you see here. It’s 6’6″ by 6’6″ and assembled with 3/8″ by 3-1/2″ lag bolts. It could probably hold everyone who ever views this page at the same time without creaking.

This was a gift for my girlfriend now wife, made from a giant scrapped hard drive, some aluminum sheet metal, a badly damaged AR turntable, and a vintage Grado walnut tonearm. Nothing says love like a DIY turntable. It has a built-in preamp so she could use it with her bookshelf system. I made it in my tiny apartment on the lower east side, which is why there’s so much other shit in every picture. Most of the construction pics are scanned Polaroids from an old SX-70 Land camera converted to 600 film. A very fun camera to have.

This is a fake version of the Ortofon base for a Thorens TD-124. It’s made from 3 layers of 1″ ply if I remember correctly. I bartered for my 124, which came with a terrible base from a listening station from a phonograph museum in Berlin. More SX-70 pictures, sorry the scans stink.