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There are many ways to enhance the entrance to a house, or to simply add a pleasing detail to a gazebo, a backyard deck or patio. In this video we create a working prototype of a solar lantern that could be used in many indoor or outdoor situations. With the solar light, this lantern can be placed outside to provide years of automatic on and off use as the re-purposed solar light will recharge the internal battery during the day and give about 6 hours of illumination to the lantern when the sun goes down.
There were some challenges to building this unit, specifically finding something that was opaque enough to hide seeing the light inside the lantern, but still bright enough to pass light and to "glow" in the dark and show off the detail. We tried many, many products and finally found a small quantity of rice paper that we were not entirely happy with, so this could use more experimentation.
Making A Solar Lantern
All in all we loved the design and how the 3 dimensional aspect of the lantern was enhance with the projecting pieces on top. It was an easy build and we found all or the material were pieces that were left over from previous projects and the solar light was purchased as a used item from a local thrift store so it was a very economical build too.
Copyright - Colin Knecht
Woodworkweb.com
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One of the joys of woodworking in how you can make other people's life more enjoyable, which I often think is one of the main motivators for woodworkers. Collecting attaboys. This article and associated video could very well place you in high esteem by any gardeners in your life. The design is easy to build, I took a day or so to build it, and it's easy and convenient. The main feature with building a project like this is to build it around something. In our case we built it around the catching trays that are underneath the grated top.
One of the complaints I have heard over the years is that it's nice to use these stands for potting plants but trying to get the dirt our from under the grates is often a challenge, which is why we gave this stand some standard catching trays and placed them under and easily-removable grated top.
Build A Gardeners Potting Bench
To start off with let's talk about wood. Almost every plan you will see for one of these stands tell you to use Cedar as the wood. We didn't ...
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An original version Adirondack chairs as we know it was first designed in 1903 by Thomas Lee. In Canada the chair is sometimes referred to as a Muskoka Chair. The Chair that Thomas Lee designed, he asked a local carpenter to make for him. Apparently the carpenter, Harry Bunnell could see it was great design, so Bunnell filed for, and was granted a patent for the chair, without the permission of Lee. Bunnell then went on to manufactured the chairs under his name for the next 20 years.
The original chair design has been so good it has stood the test of time and over a hundred years later, woodworkers are still making a variety of Adirondack type chairs.
Building an Adirondack Chair
What always amazes me is just how comfortable this chair can be. Now make no mistake, not all Adirondack chairs are comfortable and to a degree it does depend on your body type how well you fit the chair. The features that really make this chair comfortable are the coved back and the scooped seat along with the position of the wide arms. All of which combine into making a great, comfortable out door chair.
The plans we used are the widely published plans from Fine Woodworking Magazine and they even publish the plans on their website, we provide that link at the end of this article, and the reason we did that is so if you DO decide to make this great chair you will have at least scanned the article and give you a few heads-up ideas that we encountered.