Cameraphone picture, cropped.

I have no idea why a roll of toilet paper would be so sad, but it’s still cute.

Have you come up with any great tricks & tips for moving? Let me know! Comment or email mike@mikefigueroa.com

My fianceé & I are moving from Las Vegas to Washington state. I now know that relocating is, in the words of a theatrical colleague, “one of the most stressful things we do on-purpose.”

Sure, moving within town can be tough but moving to a different temperate zone carries extra layers of stress & challenges. In my case, I happen to think the payoff well outweighs the rest.

But moving is one of those things that is often done so hastily that we forget to use our intellect to make the process easier (indeed the stakes are often so high that we refuse to experiment for fear something may dramatically go wrong.) This is a particularly pressing issue for those of us that tend not to live on the ground floor.

BUT WHY?! Why is it that we don’t invent, build, and succeed at making one of the most common of modern labors a smarter & easier affair?

Sure, I have for years enjoyed the benefit of wheels when moving my belongings by using hand trucks, piano dollies, and by installing casters on heavy objects. But that’s been the end of innovation in this regard both for me & for almost everyone.

Take a look at the above video of the men from the piano store moving the piano down the stairs, how barbaric!

Surely we have come far enough along that methods & inventions which employ our modern understanding of fundamental concepts of introductory physics, the empirical laws of Nature, and our own dislike of manual labor should be available to to men & women the world over?

Driven by a desire to make things easier on my lady-love (in an embarrassingly un-chivalrous twist of fate I was not able to assist with the loading of our moving truck) I decided that I had just enough time, tools and lumber to do some justice to the grand march of evolution that produced thinking man version 2010 CE: I would build a Simple Machine [wiki].

Since we were moving out of a second floor apartment our boxes would be moving down stairs, gravity is on our side for this operation. I decided to build a slide, ramp or chute [wiki].

Luckily I have piles of remnant wood available from building scenery for theater, so I was able to slap this together quite fast. Basically, I overlapped  two pieces of 1/2″ plywood that each were a bit longer than half the hypotenuse of the stair tread run. I used an air-powered nail gun to join the pieces with 1″ brads. I added a 2×4 piece to the underside of the top to grip the landing/top stair.

After twice-measuring the stairs & material, I added nailed a small piece of plywood to the bottom of the upper chute board. This allowed me to hold the two pieces together in exactly the right spot as I nailed the two boards together while it positioned on the staircase.

I was concerned that the friction of the unfinished & un-sanded wood and the length of the run would overcome the potential energy of the weight of the object combined with the incline. I was prepared to staple heavy polystyrene plastic sheeting to the chute to decrease friction. It didn’t turn out to be necessary – after testing a few boxes, I realized I didn’t even need to push the boxes, gravity took care of the whole job.

In all the hubbub & haste, I forgot to take any pictures. Here I’ve created a limited test recreation plus video:

Click for full-size.

The users of the ramp were said the ramp worked wonders until someone “stepped on it wrong” and broke it. After that it continued to work wonders; it just had to be adjusted every so often.

After the ease & success of this project, I’m tempted to try all manner of cockamamie ideas for moving that come to my head. This seems like an huge area of human advancement just ripe for the picking!

Have you come up with any great tricks & tips for moving? Let me know! Comment or email mike@mikefigueroa.com

(With all due respect to scene painters everywhere,) I really hate seeing certain things painted on a flat surface when for the same amount of effort you can have such a better product by bringing it into the third dimension.

Books & Stone

Here is a quick method for bringing stone masonry to life, one that is also cost-effective.

First cut a sheet of Styrofoam to the desired size+shape, then layout your brickwork design with a marker. Your choice of foam thickness will depend on the application, for this sample given to a client I used only 3/4″. I can imagine situations where 2+ inches would be desirable.

The next step is the most unconventional. Let’s abuse a power tool:

I use a standard plunging palm router for quickly carving precise grooves into foam. This is definitely tool abuse, as the router’s air intake will most assuredly suck in tiny EPS bits. That is why I have a cheap router that I use only for this purpose.

In the photo above, you can see a large paint stirring stick. I used this as a straight edge to guide the router.  If this were a larger piece, a drywall square would have been more appropriate.

Foam is messy, when possible use a clean suit. Or, have your air compressor charged & ready to dust you off.

Next, use a plaster of your choice. I wanted this to be feather-light so I used pre-mixed Joint Compound (drywall mud) which, if purchased in large enough quantities, can be very inexpensive. For example, the contractor’s tub below (61.7 lbs) costs as much as 12 lbs of consumer-packaged DAP brand mud.

Simply brush the joint compound on with a brush. This is thick stuff, so you may find it easier going if you use scissors to trim the brush down to 1″ hairs or less. Click the image below to see additional detail in the almost-finished faux stonework:

Click for full-size.

Paint in whatever what suits you best, but I personally like lightly dusting with spray paints. Use an airbrush for larger pieces. Due to it’s plasticity the joint compound adds some strength to the foam, but is by no means safe from injury.

Cheers, FIG

The easiest way to get me to take an interest in something is to ask me for advice. Tony did that the other day: he asked how he could get one of his designs on some t-shirts and avoid the iron-on transfer process.  I read an Instructable by Threadbanger and thought, “I could do this!”. I was right. Read on.

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I’m not. But it’s in the back of my mind now. I’m sure I’ll be spending more time on the RPF or Make forums soon. Well here’s why I bring it up – I’m driving around the other day & I’m thinking about ‘which Arduino should I get’, when I get around to thinking about all the sensors & accessories I could hook up to it. I don’t want a big hassle when I want to fiddle around with electronics so I was thinking about a way to spare even more parts from being spent (soldered) on a prototype than the breadboards alone might accomplish. That brings me to what I made today:

RJ11 analog signal test 1. Close-up on click, don't blame you if you don't!

Uh-gly! This is the only shot you’re getting, trust me: no one wants to see the soldering job on this beastrocity. Right now, it only does one thing (it lights up), and it doesn’t even do that like it means it.

Basically what I have here is a quick project to serve as a proof-of-concept for an analog electronic signal network. When needing low price, reliability or rapid-development you can almost always go with something off-the-shelf. In this case, telephone jacks connectors (RJ11) seemed like a quick & easy way to get this bird off the ground, and (if further developed) make for modular & expandable setup.

Here’s a general layout diagram:

1. 9-volt battery (I didn’t have any AA/AAA carriages) awaits user-input via
2. momentary switch, which meets up with one of the 4 wires at the back of the
3. phone jack, which is of course has a
4. regular telephone wire connecting it with another
5. phone jack the current is runs through a sufficient
6. resistor, protecting an
7. ordinary LED.
8. In a larger setup we could see a central network ground or perhaps one at each non-passive station; however as currently configured,
9. the electricity runs back through the jacks & line, closing the circuit at
10. the negative battery terminal.

There’s a lot of room for improvement. For starters, using RJ61 or Ethernet (8P8C) would nearly double system capacity with little other changes. But we have the makings here of a method of signaling confederates in a show or activating equiptment via relays.

Shift register-based parallel to serial circuits could be added to make each individual wire of each line carry multiple signals. It would be even better if they could be added inline, after the fashion of couplers or RF filters.

For Etrienne, my #1 commenter:

This is like my first photoshop ever from “back in the day”. I’ve always wanted to use an iron-on transfer to make a t-shirt out of this. I’m glad I didn’t toss out my old hard drive. It’s fun finding old projects.

I found this picture of the bed frame we made, inspired by a similar construction by my dad (Big Fig). Want to make one? (more…)