PEP Badge: Oddball

This is some heat duct I replaced and installed.  
 I needed to run heat duct to two bedrooms.  Added an 8inch T out of the furnace and ran 8inch up through the ceiling to another 8inch T.  For bedroom #1 I reduced it down to a 6inch duct to a vent I added in the baseboard.  For bedroom #2 I reduced it to a 6inch then to a 4inch flex duct that I could run under the joists to a vent I added in the floor.
 In my kitchen the old register needed replacing.  I removed the old 8x10 register and 8inch duct from the basement and replaced it with an insulated 8inch flex duct.  The new replacement register was 10x10 that I made into the 8x10 that I needed.  

I had to tile a bathroom floor.  
The depth of the floor was 1.5 inches deep so I used Portland cement and concrete sand to raise it .75 inch. After it dried I laid the tile using thin set in a herring bone pattern.  Later I pointed it with type-s cement to match the other room as opposed to doing typical tile grouting.
The cement is still green in the finished picture.

I crocheted a disguise for my porch goose. If Otis or Otessa is from anywhere around the Ohio Valley they understand the cultural significance of dressed porch geese.
Seriously though, if this doesn't qualify I understand but I felt like it bridges some aspects of textiles (creating custom fit clothing from natural materials) and community (artwork/decoration for the neighborhood, cultural trends). It certainly feels "odd" just not sure if ball. I'd only ask for 0.5 point here given the piano factor, its more about the skills involved creating a woven piece of "art" or clothing.

This took me about 8 hours of crocheting with six colors of yarn.

(This is my first oddball submission so I hope I've provided all the necessary details)

I've been wanting to make a fabric haybox for a long time. This should be very helpful for decoctions and dyebaths, yogurt making, and of course slow-cooking food.

Nothing new to make this apart from the thread.  The canvas is a cotton remnant from my mom's donated stash. All the filling is tiny unusable scraps of natural fabrics (mostly cotton, with some wool and linen). Loops are the only synthetic bits (upcycled lanyard).

Fully self-drafted to fit my medium sized pot in which we cook beans and grains.

The most time consuming part was sorting through piles of fabric scraps to identify and rip/cut up truly unsalvageable textile (and I do free quilting, so in order to qualify as "unsalvageable", a piece must really be minuscule or worn thin).  I estimate that 3 pounds of fiber that would otherwise have gone to a landfill were used. There's a reason textiles are so hard to recycle!

I've measured the temperature, and it can keep a liter of water in the "safe food zone" (above 60oC) for at least two hours (starting from boiling).

And it passes the "very cool" test from my teenagers.

Took about two and a half hours of work in many 10 minute increments

I have been working on a project that stacks functions:

1) I have been having a hard time gardening because of the number of vermin. After 2 summers at this house, located on the Wildlife-Urban interface, I have struggled to keep new sprouts from being eaten. I feel like my efforts to be a gardener have merely been transferred to feeding the vermin. Even my mint, alliums, and horseradish get eaten!!! I need a far better solution than trapping.

2) My kids yearn for a pet but I am definitely not interested in having an indoor pet. I just don't feel like an animal lives it's best life trapped indoors; I feel the same goes for us, humans. I'd like to facilitate teaching my kids the importance of having a routine and a responsibility to another living being. I observe how they interact with animals and I think they're ready for a pet.

3) I sometimes have butchering scraps that I'd prefer to give to an animal rather than bury.

After spending time at Wheaton Labs and taking notes of how the boots manage the cats on property plus the successful hunts that the cats there have, I made plans to replicate this system at my house.

This BB submission is for an insulated, outdoor cat house.

I used a combination of hard and soft wood scraps that I already had available to me. I also completed the fire rack with forethought that I would mount the cat house on top. You'll notice that the fire rack overhangs, intentionally. I will be taking temperature measurements of the interior of the cat house. If the cat house doesn't stay warm enough in the winter then the location of the cat house enables me to make a 6in hole through the stucco exterior wall that would lead to top shelf of my laundry room where I could then mount an indoor cat house. For now, this additional step may not be necessary.

I used wool tanning scraps that my friend gave me to staple into the interior of the cat house.

I mounted the cat house on top of the fire rack to give the cat protection from wildlife.

Now, I just need an outdoor cat =)

So I've got a RMH.  It needs annual cleaning.  The most challenging part of that cleaning for me has been the heat exchange pipes going through the mass.  I have 3 clean out ports for this task, but still it's a challenge, esp. on the last segment where I've got a turn and tight working conditions.  I started thinking what I need is a new tool to help me with this, essentially a ball or plug of some sort that I can pull through to sweep the fly ash along in front of it to where I can more easily access it with the shop vac.  Seems like something I can make.

I went to the craft store looking for something about the right size and happened to notice a yarn "log".  This formed the basis.  I needed a way to securely pull it from both directions.  The last thing I want is for an attached cord to pull off when it's in the middle of the pipe leaving it stuck where I can't reach it.  I utilized a couple copper disks, drilled some holes in them and then fed two thick copper wires through the yarn log and disks, coiling the wire around at each end to both give me anchor points for the ropes and also secure the copper disks that will be too large to be pulled through the yarn logs.  Hopefully this makes sense.  In order to better secure the yarn from unraveling and compact it down to the right size for my pipes I busted out the handy man's secret weapon, duct tape.  Hey I'm working on a tool for ducts right?

I used a fish rod to feed the rope through and then pulled the sweep plug through.  It took a bit of trial and error to get the right amount of compaction with the tape for the whole thing to fit properly, but it worked quite well.  Still a messy job, but it was easier to clean out the ducts with this.

Time wise, this was pretty easy to make.  I'd say a half hour at most.  It may even be considered too insignificant to qualify for any points, but I wanted to share it anyway as others here might want to consider making such a thing for their RMHs.

I use my bike a lot.  I like to make this functional use not just recreation.  Having a decent trailer I can hook up to my bike would be handy at times.  I had an old kids trailer I found at a yard sale decades ago, but it needed to be renovated for my use, plus I needed to fashion a way to hook it up to my bike.  This oddball bb submission is about that process.

In searching through my scrap parts I found a large heavy duty hasp and some old casters.  I used these to make the connecting hitch for the bike.  Initially I thought it might be handy to have the hinge part of the hasp still functional but after a recent run with a heavy load of logs I discovered that wasn't the best idea.  So I adjusted things to secure that down such that it can't pivot on that hinge section anymore and it works much better.

I took off all the fabric parts and fashioned a bottom board to the trailer.  I did paint the frame black to better match my bike, but can see that was a waste of time as it's rapidly being scratched off with use.  

The trailer was quite old and the tires it had were cracking with age and needed to be replaced.  I opted to do this with solid rubber tires so I won't need to ever worry about getting a flat on the trailer while carrying a load.  Since it's not intended to haul kids around I'm not too concerned that the ride in the trailer won't be as smooth with solid tires.  

If I deduct the time I spent farting around with things that didn't work, and figuring out how to go about this I probably only spent a couple hours on the project.

Jesse Lane wrote: I had to tile a bathroom floor.  
The depth of the floor was 1.5 inches deep so I used Portland cement and concrete sand to raise it .75 inch. After it dried I laid the tile using thin set in a herring bone pattern.  Later I pointed it with type-s cement to match the other room as opposed to doing typical tile grouting.
The cement is still green in the finished picture.

It took me 16 hours over three days to complete.
The above post was accepted but no points were given.  Was it because I failed to post the time it took?

It feels like this should already be a BB, likely in the foraging badge, but I don't see it, so I'm submitting this for consideration here as an Oddball.

Wild edible foods are great!  They take care of themselves, are generally very nutrient dense, and naturally find their place in polycultures.  You just have to go and harvest them at the right time...

... actually there can be a bit more involved.  Nutrient dense foods are commonly found in the wild.  However, calorie dense ones are more rare.  Lots of critters want these calorie dense foods too so they often have stronger layers of protection.  Nuts are a fine example of this.  Some nuts are worse than others.  There is already a BB for gathering hickory nuts.  However, my personal experience indicates this is the easiest part by far of actually having an edible food from them.  The real work is in shelling them to separate out the delicious, nutritious, and calorie dense nut meats.  Hickory nuts are like black walnuts in that the nut meat is interlocked in the shell, rarely coming out cleanly and easily.  The shell is also quite hard, dense, and resistant to cracking.

I've been gathering and shelling hickory nuts for a while now, but only just recently thought to submit the process as an oddball BB.  Previously I had done an oddball metalworking BB about the little contraption I made to initially crack the hard shells without making a huge mess, along with making a couple nutpicks specifically sized for hickory nuts.  

For this BB I'm doing the actual nut processing, starting with the uncracked nuts.  So I got out my tool and a hammer to do the initial shell cracking.  These all then go into a bowl for the real work of processing, that of pulling them open and getting  out the nut meats, hopefully without any shell fragments.  I really hate eating nuts and suddenly biting down on a shell bit so I take great care when doing this to separate them out.  I've found a massively useful tool for this is a good pair of wire cutters.  These let me get into tight spots on the shell to snip and crack away sections, opening up better access to the nut meat.  I probably use them more than I do the nut picks to be honest.

The batch of shagbark hickory nuts you see in the photos below took me roughly 3 hours to process, resulting in just over 1 cup of nutmeat.  If there is a faster way to do it I have yet to read about it.  That is if you really want the nutmeats.  I realize one could also just mash them all into a paste, shells and all, then mix with water, simmer, and let it settle to get a nut milk which extracts some of the calories and nutrients with much less time involved.  However, I like eating the actual nuts.  They are very tasty, just very labor intensive to get.  I don't believe anyone has developed a commercial way to process shagbark hickory nuts either.  The interlocking shells means it pretty much needs to be done by hand.  So if anyone ever offers to share their shelled hickory nuts with you, realize they are offering you a true gift of goodness and labor!