If you're familiar with the German-owned supermarket chain Aldi, you'll know that every week they offer Special Buys, and quite often these things are absolute bargains. At £12.99, this little cordless screwdriver definitely falls into the 'bargain' category. I haven't used it in anger yet, but I have tested it on pine and oak, and it performs extremely well. If you do a lot of screwing (stop sniggering at the back), this is the perfect thing to use alongside a cordless drill - the time saved in changing bits totally justifies the cost of this chunky little tool. Highly recommended.

I've had quite a few blogs in years gone by, and sometimes I wouldn't post in them for a month. But this blog, well. This blog has exceeded all expectations. Seven months without a post. Seven. Silent. Months. OK, the truth is, I forgot about it. Planet Keef blog? Wassat? Anyway, I'm back, and I'll try to write some posts about what I've been up to all this time. See you later.

Assembling the Rage 3S Until a few months before I bought this machine, I had no idea that such things as sliding mitre saws existed. Sure, I'd seen them in DIY stores, but had no idea what they were, and still less idea that I needed one. But after trying to make a picture frame with mitred corners I started looking for decent mitre blocks, and I had a distant memory of using a hand operated mitre saw in woodwork classes at school. Searching online for those things threw up results for lots of Sliding Mitre Saws and I realised that was exactly what I needed. The Evolution Rage 3-S seemed to be a good bet for me. It was a great price, about £100 from Screwfix, but there's always the possibility that something so cheap will be badly made and unreliable. And although it's made in China (isn't everything these days?), it's designed in the UK and it had great reviews on various websites I looked at. So I bought one. Cutting wood The machine comes in a bi...

When I renamed my 'doing things' channel to Planet Keef (it had previously been Keef Makes and before that Keef Talks), only about a month ago, I made a spiffy new logo for it. It was shiny metallic 3D letters spelling out the name, orbiting a 3D model of the earth. It was all very slick, and had a wonderfully bombastic fanfare to go with it. And it was totally wrong for the character of me and my channel. I mentioned that I wasn't 100% thrilled with it at the time, but I had to get something up. Anyway, a few weeks later, completely out of the blue, I got an email from a 20-something freelance graphic designer in Liverpool. He said he was a big fan, and he'd made a logo for Planet Keef. I had a look at the logo and fell in love with it more or less instantly. Here it is: The designer's name is Will Gossage. We agreed a modest fee and I set about nailing the logo to everything connected with Planet Keef. You can see more of Will's work on his website  www...

I did my first Planet Keef livestream a few days ago. I had done one a few months ago on Keef Cooks and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wanted to do one for Planet Keef for the simple reason that livestreams last much longer than edited videos - about 90 minutes is what I aim for - and so it's a good way to pile up a lot of watch time. And if you're wondering why I'm worried about watch time, well I'm not, but YouTube loves it. In fact YouTube loves it so much that under the new rules for monetising videos on new channels, you need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time in the previous 12 months. It's a significant barrier to entry. To give you some perspective, right now Planet Keef has 601 subscribers and has had 20,041 minutes of watch time in the last 365 days. So that's 334 hours. (I'm not really being fair here, the channel was wandering around in the wilderness until about a month ago and in the last 28 days it's had 12,000 minutes ...

I only came across this recently -  a very simple and cheap way to make your own wood stain. All you do is pop a chunk of fine wire wool into a jar, top it up with the vinegar of your choice, give it a shake then unscrew the lid a little to let the gases escape. After about two days, remove the wire wool, filter your stain through some kitchen paper, and that's your wood stain ready to use. Now, the colour you get depends to some extent on the type of vinegar you used and on the amount of tannin in the wood you want to stain. In the video of this, I made up small jars of stain using white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, white (distilled) vinegar, red wine, malt and balsamic vinegars. Then I tested them all on oak, softwood, ordinary plywood, MDF, and an unidentified plywood that I made my workbench top out of (the top and bottom skins are kind of reddish). The results on the oak, which has a lot of tannin, were amazing. They were solid black, blueish-black, and a range of greys....

I've been using this amazing software to edit my videos for about six months now. I am by no means an expert, but I can use it to do pretty much everything I need. This video is the first of four, and together, they will be the thing that I wish existed when I first found myself at the foothills of Resolve's learning curve (replace 'curve' with 'mountain', or even 'impossibly steep mountain'). Hopefully, if you follow them through, you'll be spared the grief I went through on my journey. The 'problem' is that DaVinci Resolve is a massive piece of software, It's loaded with tons of features for the professional editor - and at some point I hope to learn how to use them, but for now all I want to do is slam some clips together. Yes, there's lots of teaching material out there, from the 1000+ page manual, to tutorials from people who either decline to speak at all, or who just mumble unintelligibly, or people who are clearly expert...

When I was a kid - maybe 11 - I got an electronics kit for Christmas. It promised the ability to make all kinds of exciting projects, including building a radio. Of course, being a child I wanted to run before I could walk, so I went straight to the radio project, couldn't make it work, and the kit didn't get used much after that. Now I'm a bit more than a kid, somewhat more patient and methodical, and I've got a new electronics kit. Basically it contains an Arduino Uno R3 and lots of other components including motors, LEDs and LED displays, sensors, buzzers, breadboards and wires. Sadly, it doesn't contain the things you need to make a radio. And I haven't entirely grown out of the learning to walk thing - I wanted to make an LED light up, so I touched the two termini to a 9V battery. And POOM!. It did light up. Briefly. Then a smell of burning pervaded the air. And I had a dead LED. In this video I'm unboxing the kit and then doing my first project....

We bought our son a beautiful print for Christmas, but not a frame. Maybe we thought we already had a frame we could re-use, I can't remember. But I do remember being in the man-cave, looking at a pile of gorgeous engineered oak flooring I'd got from Freecycle and wondering what amazing things I could do with it. I couldn't do anything as amazing as using it as actual flooring in even the smallest room because there's only 1.5 square metres of it. Inspiration struck and I decided to make a picture frame. I had about 5 days (actually, a couple of hours each day) before we were due to drive down to That London to deliver it, which I thought should be plenty of time. As it turned out, it was a close-run thing. My first attempt involved mitred corners, but I have neither the skill nor the tools to cut them accurately. I worked on it for 2 days before I abandoned it. The second attempt was much more successful, involving full-height stiles. Here's the video of me ...

Yo dudes, wassup? New year, new channel, new blog. This is the blog that goes with my new YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/planetkeef . I'll be linking to all the new videos here, and you can leave comments here or on YouTube. What is this Planet, Keef? I might call it 'an eclectic mix' - it will cover a range of topics that interest me (except cooking, which has its own channel and website ). I'll be doing woodwork and DIY, Arduino and electronics, coding and software tutorials, general chitchat, maybe some ASMR, road trips and travel. And if any companies are kind enough to send me products, I'll do unboxing and reviews of those things. Bear in mind, I'm not an expert in most of the things I'll be playing with, so I'll be approaching most projects from a beginner's viewpoint. So don't expect perfection, or anything close, and do expect missteps, mishaps and mistakes. It should be fun, can't wait to get started!