Woodgears

I love his videos about making his own bandsaws, belt sanders, etc. I've heard/read of people doing this sort of thing, but his videos documenting the process are really fascinating. Also his website is well worth a peruse: https://woodgears.ca/

This might be a different Ask HN, but does anyone have suggestions on avoiding the content farm stuff? Searching reddit works, but amounts to being trapped in a walled garden. I've found a lot of great stuff on random independent websites (i.e. https://woodgears.ca/, http://gizmology.net/) that have no Reddit presence. Filtering those out is a great loss. Something like the Yahoo Directory (hierarchical tree of hand-sorted topics) could work, but that's long gone. Thoughts?

I also think it seems pretty appealing. There have been some interesting things on HN over the years about it. I loved this talk about how the tools you use determine how you look at problems (Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw And if you haven't seen him before, you're about to fall in love with Matthias Wandel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel/videos http://woodgears.ca/

A website can be huge. My uncle idolizes Mathias Wandel, who makes amazing stuff with wood: http://woodgears.ca/ He's huge with the DIY and home projects crowd :)

It's a real great message, yes, they gave a shit. They gave a shit because the author likely paid >10,000 CAD. Yes, ten thousand Canadian dollars. Or $7692 USD. This is significant to me because I feel like for a table (conference room or not!) anyone asking for that type of price point _should_ give a shit. I'm all for nice furniture (in fact, I've built some) – but I'd say some of the cape-wearing folks who really care are often doing so behind the scenes, or, if you're lucky: in a position at a company (or their own company) who really has pride in what they're doing. I think the author found a company who gives a shit, but I'd also like to point to other makers who give a shit without the five-figure price point. Here's a small list: - https://woodgears.ca (you will be making these items yourself! Plans are ~15 USD) - Dave Moore (https://www.youtube.com/user/dpmbn8) – That one support agent who didn't give up :)

Sometimes I come across grand hobbies/challenges like this that inspire me to challenge myself in similar ways.. 1/4 scale grave digger: http://www.youtube.com/user/rcWizzard/videos?sort=da&view=u Matthias Wandel's various projects: http://woodgears.ca Giant robot project: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL13A11662BDE6EB83 But at some point, I end up convincing myself that it's a bad investment of my time. Some examples: - The above referenced 1/4 grave digger project would be an awesome test of my fabrication skills. But when it's done, I won't enjoy playing with it. 1000's of hours for "push stick forward, vehicle goes foreword". Kind of like lego's, the fun's all in the build. - I'd love to get into woodworking, but I already have all the furniture I need. Why would I invest in a 1k wood shop (that's CL prices)? What would I create with all the tools and experience? I'm not going to quit my job as a programmer to become an entry-level woodworker. - I'd love to build my own sawmill (kind of like Jaimie), and build from nature in general. But where would I get wood? Can I make it cheaper than store bought? Do I have the time to invest so that I don't wind up having to go to the store anyway? - I'm really fascinated by CNC, 3d printers, and metal casting. I want to be able to make my own stuff, and excuse myself from a consumer culture. But those things all involve pretty significant money/time investments. And who are we kidding? After that huge investment,…

A modern take on Matthias Wandel's classic [0], which has you guess a variety of geometric attributes (e.g. angle bisection, centroid locating, shape regularization), not just simple partitioning of a line. [0] https://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html

Mattias is a wizard of woodworking. His other site has numerous amazing projects: https://woodgears.ca/index.html (like a 26" bandsaw: https://woodgears.ca/big_bandsaw/26in.html and pantorouter: https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/xl.html)

> the gear broke ... bad quality wood ... material was MDF Try something better? > It's vital to use good plywood for the gears. Ordinary spruce or fir plywood has layers that are too coarse, and the wood is not strong enough. But the Baltic birch plywood, with thin birch layers throughout, makes for an excellent material https://woodgears.ca/gear/howto.html

This is very impressive! I like how the 3D model has a “view cube” to show the orientation, and that it updates in real-time as parameters are changed They call these types of programs [1] “configurators” and they’re pretty fun to play with, great for clients to see what they want, especially with workshop drawings as output! It also reminds me a little bit of [2] Matthias Wandel‘s “wooden gear generator”, which I think has been somewhat profitable. Maybe it would be good to highlight the parts of the model that are changing with the parameters. I know it shows the dimension that’s changing, but it would be even clearer to highlight the model itself I think [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configurator [2] https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html

Someone mentioned this site in the comments: https://woodgears.ca/ For example, this kind of visual tutorial page is impossible in Gemini: https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/linear.html In it's insistence on "human consumption of predominantly written material" Gopher has removed the possibility of such content, too. Edit: corrected a link

This should meet your standard, I think: https://woodgears.ca/

Matthias Wandel might interest you, woodworking with the hacker spirit (including making his own tools...out of wood) https://woodgears.ca

I agree, although I think the purpose is to teach Elixir and Nerves. On a side note your website, https://woodgears.ca/, is awesome. If anyone sees this comment check out https://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html

Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but: https://woodgears.ca/ is woodworking from an engineering perspective.

Those who enjoy other mechanisms made from wood may also like https://woodgears.ca/ The drawing mechanism reminds me of this technique from 1958 for generating vector characters entirely with analogue circuitry: http://www.nixiebunny.com/crtgen/crtgen.html http://www.glensstuff.com/fouriersynthchargen/fouriersynthchargen.htm

Maybe it's worthwhile linking to your assessment of John Heisz' router table here: https://woodgears.ca/reader/router_table.html

Matthias Wandel has a website - https://woodgears.ca/ - which contains a lot of guides/useful things for woodworking. I don't believe he has any 3D modelling tools, but he does have some software to help with building wooden gears, and other useful things. Doesn't strictly answer your question, but if you're looking to make "simple furniture" 3D modelling is not strictly necessary, you can do a lot with a few simple measurements and 2D-designing.

The best replacement for sketchup these days is OLD sketchup (version 8), from ten years ago. You can still get it. More on that at http://woodgears.ca/sketchup

There is a very surprising statement on his "Gear Template Generator" page (https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/index.html): > I recommend printing the gears with an ink jet printer. Even cheap ink jet printers print very scale accurate but Not all laser printers are accurate. Does anybody know whether that's still the case, and why?

Here's an interesting read on wood hardness: http://www.woodgears.ca/hardness_test/ It's pretty amazing how much variability there is between samples of the same species.

This guy has a gear template generator and lots of tips in addition to documentation of his own projects: http://woodgears.ca/.

> the Canadian guy with the wooden gears and the pantograph Matthias Wandel[1]? [1] http://woodgears.ca

Easy to build workbench, Mattias' own tutorial http://woodgears.ca/workbench/build.html Workbenches https://www.reddit.com/r/Workbenches/ Also make sure to check out the Woodworking subreddit. Lots of great projects and comments. Woodworking: all things made from trees. https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/

Watch the adventure when an Engineer takes up woodworking... Mathias (https://www.woodgears.ca/) has made some incredible bench tools and woodworking projects.

My favorite project of his is the pantorouter. http://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/ I plan on buying his Sketchup plans and building it this fall/winter.

See his follow-up for discussion of that and other issues: http://woodgears.ca/toys/slinky2.html

Hey you have a typo on your webpage: http://woodgears.ca/ "Send me email: (Frequencly asked questions)" By the way is this your full time job? I imagine making one high quality article a week is pretty intense. The stuff you do is very cool! (just curious since you seem to have a software background and I am interested to know how you managed to transition to doing a hobby full time =P)

This guy is like the flip side of Matthias Wandel[1] Very cool. [1] http://woodgears.ca

His woodworking videos are fantastic. Also, FWIW, he's now got a whole page about the cameras he's used to film them: http://woodgears.ca/misc/best_camera.html