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!