Tuesday, September 27, 2011

a stack of wood plus some elbow grease gives me...

... quite a lot!

i bought some salvaged timber strips, or known as "kok chai" in cantonese, some months back for some home improvement project. gabriel introduced these timber strips to me and i have lots of fun with them. for a half baked, low skilled nitwit wood worker like me, the flexible kok chai can be used to build just about anything.  have built quite a lot from just a stack of these strips. they are usually sold in bundles of 120 ft, or 10 pieces of 12 ft strips. cost? less than rm50 for such a bundle!

besides, i find wood working to be therapeutic. it is so calming to work with our bare hands. fyi, everything i built here is accomplished with hand tools only. a band saw, wood glue, screws, wood brackets and some clamps.



first thing i built, is this "creeper's aid". the base though is not made from timber strips but rather some bed frame someone in my neighbourhood threw away! yes, during my walks with tonto, we scour around the neighbourhood for rubbish. as the saying goes, one man's rubbish is another's gold.

this fella stands at 6 ft tall but unfortunately the plant is taking so slow to grow. hmm...




also built this compost rack. i'm tired of hearing the excuse of "not enough space" to compost. how about 3" by 1"? this is all the space taken up by our compost rack.




 but the most fun i have, is building this food dehydrator. a year ago, i blogged about making your own food dehydrator. well, that crude thing consists of 4 pieces of wooden plank (salvaged from the neighbourhood) and some L brackets.

since we use this quite often, that ugly piece got to be retired. and so i built this fella. since it is only oiled, you could see the timber strips clearly.


at the lower end, a 100w incandescent light bulb is used to provide heat. 


in case you are wondering,  a 100w light bulb manages to heat up the upper rack all the way till 50 degrees celcius. just nice for a slow dehydration.
the thermometer is a roast meat thermometer. excellent for this purpose here!
oh yeah, among my wood working tools, i could print some letters too. nice eh?





 on the left, drying some pig ears here. tonto absolutely loves this!
 on the right, drying some tomatoes. there's 7 tomatoes here. 8 hours give us some wonderful semi dried tomatoes.






so with some elbow grease, you could accomplish all this from just a bundle of timber strips of less than rm50!

best of all, these are all YOUR handiwork. there's no commercial stuff like this!