construction

All posts tagged construction

I’ve been forced to have some down time over the last few weeks with stitches in my lower back. This meant all effort on the skate ramp came to a halt while that healed up. Finally, this weekend, I was back onto the project to finish it up. The final part of construction is some railings at each end. Before I got too far along with them though, I really wanted to add some skateboarding brand decals below the lip on one of the transitions. These were purchased online from a local skateboarding shop.

Skate ramp
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My planned “big project” for these Christmas holidays was to be the playfield swap on Pinbot. That’s been put aside for now to focus on another project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time – build my own skate ramp for use in the backyard. Around 7 or 8 years ago I would spend a lot of time going to different skate parts and spots around Melbourne with my inline skates. I always dreamed of having my own ramp or ledge to skate on. Now I have kids and they are of an age where skateboarding (and rollerblading) is in their scope of interest – so it’s a great excuse to build the ramp I always wanted. My kids will love it and I’ll love it even more. I had a few reminders this year of how short life is, so enough putting it off – time to build a ramp and enjoy it. I started out by doing some research into just what sort of ramp I’d like to have and found plans for this:

Skate ramp
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This project was completed about a month ago and i’ve been a little slack in getting the posts up for it. But here they are – Project #4.

After a bit of a break from building machines, I was recently contacted about building a new cocktail cabinet. I had hopped to do a space invaders or frogger cocktail next, but this request was for multigame style artwork – so that’s what this will be.

After some investigation into artwork and what the new owner wanted, I ended up settling on this model:


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Almost 6 months ago, I put a 90% complete fight stick project aside to continue work on a Donkey Kong cocktail cabinet with the intention of finishing it off a few weeks later. Today, I finally put the final touches into the fight stick and can now consider the project complete 🙂

A few nights back I decided to get the project finished. First up was making sure the fight stick itself could be recognised by a PC and PS3. This failed to work. The closest I could get was a windows error saying the USB device failed to load. After some testing and investigation, it looked like the USB connector on the Dual Strike PCB was to blame. A closer look at the USB (Type B) port showed one of the internal pins had been squashed back, ensuring a bad connection. Looks like at some point the port had something lean against it, and cause the pin to come lose. I got out the soldering iron and took it off the board. It probably isn’t clear in the image below, but the top right pin (inside the port) has been lifted up and is completely loose.

A replacement part was found at Jaycar for only $3. I added it to the board, connected up the PCB to the PC and success.
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I finally got around to completing the project this weekend.

Last week I organised the glass place to measure and cut the glass top for me. I also had some small DK marquees printed up, which will sit under the glass on the table top. These were simply done at BigW at $3 each.

DK Marquee
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